Adventure Title

The water swelled and yet another voice had gone missing, the captain wheeled around his pivot and stared hard at the three sailors still on deck through the wind and the rain and the hurtling gloom.

A spray of water loosened itself from the hissing beyond the rails of the ship and slammed across the deck, beating plank and skin and flailing rope. The darkness seemed to surge with a whip and the ship suddenly fell. It was the strangest feeling for Jenkins, this falling – it felt like the ship would never land but rather sink through the sea and plants and earth and into space which had to have more light than here.

The boat, in the free-fall, under heavy storm, felt like a skeleton.

There was a clear moment, as Jenkins felt his organs rise and his bones fall, when he was aware of some kind of movement just beyond his vision, something different from the forms and movement of the storm – it was measured and unhurried and all that you could fear in the dark. But it was gone just as quickly as he noticed it, and Jenkins chastised himself for his fantasies just before the ship finally landed hard to end the fall, leaving the deck with the noise of the storm, the spasms of the wind, the ropes undone from their sinks, and heavy water.

The hull was still capable of movement, and the sailors hunched against a gaping black wave for a second too long, as if out of brief, tacit amazement that the ship could stay afloat with only four of them remaining. Jenkins had somehow assumed that if the crew were to disappear, so would the boat, a body deprived of its brain – but here it was, right under their feet, lifting them up again.

The captain was the first to return to his senses. He braced his good leg ahead into the little pivot he had worn so deliberately and well into the wood and looked hard at the three sailors clutching at the ropes before him, his sopping, shaggy eyebrows almost blocking out his hard green drinking eyes.

“Not good, not good at all,” he roared and Jenkins could barely make out what he was saying though he was only a few paces away. “Not good but by God there still be breath of all of you, so we sail one. A hundred curses, Jenkins!” he barked even louder and pointed Jenkins to secure one of the riggings which he did.

“By God above the crew’s got to be here somewhere! Not a soul on deck in a squall like this and I’ll have their meat in chains if we survive the day!” He paused to choke on a little water that had sprayed him during the speech.

Jenkins stood by Boxer, who looked like some highlander out of Scott, the kind that climb a mountain with one enormous, sinewy hand while drinking and shooting out of the other. Next to him was Haven, dark and soaked and looking something like a rat with gentle beetle eyes. Boxer always swore Haven was almost his match in strength, but he somehow didn’t look it on the barren deck with his shimmering clothes clinging to his body. Jenkins was the youngest by almost five years.

“By God,” said the captain, finally regaining the ability to speak, “By God, men, it’s easy enough to sweep this ship and find where those cowards are and to the man who finds them by God you have the right to shoot first and ask questions later. Just leave man enough to man the top, but the rest can taste your steel and your fire, the unworthy scoundrels. Boxer, you take the storage and the mess. Haven, you’re in the cots. And by God and Heaven above I’ll take engineering, so,” he said, turning after he pronounced the word ‘engineering’ which left a ringing in Jenkins’ ears, “Jenkins, you’re at the helm. We’ll bring you friends enough to like but not enough to hate.”

Just as he finished the orders the ship coasted up a swell and then sank into a pocket of ocean, coming down, it seemed to Jenkins, not all in one piece and two of the seamen fell to the deck. The sky is muddy, Jenkins thought from his back with his hands on the slippery cold wood to avoid sliding starboard, and it’s hard to tell which way is up.

“Jenkins, a thousand curses, and by God, get on your feet! Hold this ship right or so help me you’ll be sleeping with the rest of the crew at the bottom of the blue sea. The rest of ye, get on with your search and find the men for me to string up.”

And they left, groping their way along rope and rail and down into the underbelly of the ship and Jenkins was alone at the helm in the cold spray, struggling for grounding and bearing in the howling darkness like under a high fever when the cold tickles your face. And he felt bad, bad and alone and he was somehow sure there weren’t any men to be found.

The darkness felt empty and he was empty and now he could tell which way was sky and which way was ocean but it didn’t matter.

Finally, he said out loud, “The hell this ship is deserted,” but it somehow didn’t ring true and he felt even worse after saying it.

Just then another mass of giant shape seemed to loom in the darkness, near as starboard stern and then even closer and then gone. It had been methodical, thought Jenkins, it wasn’t of the storm or even, he thought with a shudder, of the sea.

“The goddamn hell this ship is empty,” he said, but he couldn’t even hear it.

Staring into the shadows taxed Jenkins eyes which filled with the pelting beads and hammers of the salt-water spray and his eyes were the only things that hurt more than his ears. Jenkins had been at sea long enough to hold himself upright at the helm, but not enough not to feel panic, sheer and gutting, every time he went blind from the rain and the sea.

It was during one of these attacks, his heart so big it hurt, where the soft parts of his chest seemed hopelessly swollen and hollow, that his bones and nerves were struck by a sound off port that made him wince. It was a sound not of sea, not of man, not of bird, and not of thunder. It was a sound too deliberate for nature and too eerie for animal and came from right off the side of the rail.

He realized he had been alone far too long.

The boat lurched as if to mark all that was going on in his head, the worn wood spun out to fill in the deck and rigging and beams and all the details that should make up a boat. Standing there, a lone, soaked, shivering figure at the helm of a great, deserted ship, it seemed just as likely that there would be no ship as there would be no mates around him. But the wood was solid beneath him, and he still held the wheel in his hands.

Jenkins stood at the helm, watching the rigging and sinkers and rope come undone around him and the deck took on more water and he stood there without intentionally moving until it all finally seemed possible.

And then he thought, just as he went blind once more and his ears rung, it was the most absurd thing in the world to continue to stand there and man the helm. The only reason one should be standing there was out of duty or out of obligation but there was no such thing as either anymore and Jenkins knew he was the only speck of heat within a few hundred miles in any direction.

He thought quickly about the dolphins, as he had heard that they have heat, and whales, too – but the way the ocean raged and spit it seemed yet another impossible thing that it could actually harvest life and Jenkins saw that he was still standing at the helm.

And he saw a few more things, his hands bearing down on the wood and his fingers digging in with the nails, that there were only a few possibilities for where he was: if this was a dream then it didn’t really matter what he did, he could fling himself off the side or leave the helm to the whim of the squall, of just close his eyes and wait for something to change. If he was awake, then he had either gone mad and was imagining all of this so anything he were to do was equally without consequence – if he was actually at the helm of a boat someone would surely come by and forcibly remove him, the madman – or if he wasn’t mad and he was alone then his fate was sealed, out at sea as far as they were and with the water they were taking on and the pieces of ship tearing off into the darkness. And there could also be no consequences at all.

Then there is no such thing as suicide, he thought and shivered and remembered the sound off of port.

There was just one thing to do, he knew – he had to search the ship, to go under, and only then could he be satisfied that he had done all he should have done in the squall.

He left the wheel to spin as it might, which it did, and crawled through the howling darkness on his hands and knees, eyes clenched and mouth involuntarily gulping down mouthfuls of seawater which somehow didn’t taste like it should – it was all bitter. His ears were clogged and ringing still.

A strip of the waterproof caught onto a splintered plank as he approached the ladder, and just then the sound rang out from almost directly above him, it was something like a tight cable snapping along with the wailing of women in a language you don’t understand and it came from right above him but he looked up and there was nothing there but rain and somewhere far beyond it the stars and he started coughing.

Not waiting any longer for his imagination to get the best of him, nor enough to wait until the coughing subsided, Jenkins lurched at the ladder, but either his fingers failed him or the ship hit a rough pocket and Jenkins went sprawling elbow-first into the top rung of the ladder and then fell down through the hatch.

There was no way to tell how long he had been out when he came to: the boat was rolling and Jenkins was still wet. It was either much quieter down here or his ears had adjusted to the sounds or both. He didn’t notice the cold first, or the darkness below, or the miscellaneous ship objects rolling around – instead he was aware only of the emptiness and silence of the room. He had to look up the ladder to the hatch to the storm above to assure himself he was in the right place.

It wasn’t that it was silent, for there was storm. And it wasn’t that it was empty, because there were objects, like candles and pots and cups. It was empty and silent of crew and Jenkins shuddered.

It was a room usually filled with bodies and cursing and drinking and sleeping, and even when the entire crew was asleep there were still the sounds of rattling and breathing and stretching, all the sounds you hear when you don’t think you hear anything but that convince you there are people around. That you are not alone, thought Jenkins on his back, smelling a little of his own blood because his senses were very sharp and he was smelling and breathing and hearing and tasting it all.

Jenkins stood up slowly and painfully and groped around until he found a way to light the room. The shadows that played around the room were horrifying: cold and vacant and the objects that were illuminated were worse yet. All the things here for sailors, handles to be held, seats for sitting – but nothing except for the shadows and the storm and Jenkins and the dark shapes in the distance.

“Boxer!” he cried. “Boxer!”

He felt his way down one of the passageways to the mess and then to the kitchen but still – no signs of life or even bodies or even that anyone had even recently been here. How long was I out? he thought but he knew it couldn’t have been so very long because the ship was still afloat and he was still alive. But there was life in the mess – there were the chickens in the cage back in the kitchen. How many times had Jenkins stared at these chickens and thought of splitting one open for himself and depriving the officers of their omelets and grill himself the whole thing over an open fire!

It was the first time since the beginning of the squall that he thought of home.

Then, he was racing back through the passageway, back through the rows of cots and over to the ladder. A sudden drop laid him on his back, right on a roll of parchment and a few broken pens, but he was back on his feet in a heartbeat and grasping onto the rungs of the ladder.

He was already incapable of thinking that this couldn’t be happening.

They had taught you how to climb the ladder during a storm, but they also said you’d only really learn how to do it after you’ve taken a bad fall and it was just like that now as Jenkins climbed to the deck. He went up steady and firm and trembling.

The deck looked more expansive than ever, and Jenkins couldn’t make out any of the boundaries. The wooden strips of the decks dissolved into the mist and the gloom which in turn melted into the massive hurtling arch of the low sky. Here the shards of glass and personal objects and walls didn’t drown out the storm and it was hard on Jenkins’ sharpened senses and each impact of the waves seemed so loud that it had to be the last one but it wasn’t.

There was only one other place to look but Jenkins’ heart went cold and small and seized up with a strange amount of friction. But there shouldn’t be any regrets, he told himself, and I shouldn’t have to go under, I have done what I should have done. I could just stay up top until the end.

His fingers were blurred to his vision and light to the touch and as he gripped a piece of rope a quick snap in his back that tore through the rain reminded him of the fall he had taken but it didn’t matter because he didn’t have to worry what it would feel like tomorrow. And he was surprised when he thought about the shadows and about engineering, for he discovered he was still capable of feeling terror. If this is it, he thought, I shouldn’t feel afraid – it should be peace – so what does that mean?

His skin began to crawl at its edges and his heart held itself at an inhuman rate, glancing off organs and swelling the blood in his face but all the time shouting at him, commanding him, “Not now! It’s not going to end now! You won’t fail me!” and he thought of one word: engineering. He knew he could really go down where he wanted least in the world to go because he had managed to convince himself that he had to do it. Here another thought intruded, one that had been with him earlier but only now seemed to strike him as a reality – he could also throw himself over the railing. He could put out the race of his brain and the burn of his heart and the ache of his temples from the fall and the absurd commands of his heart, and he could put himself over the side and not worry about savings or earnings or his long-term health or what he should have said to Rosy four years before.

To the absurd commands of his heart – the sky beat down, rain, fog, waves, and falls, and there would be no guilt in the descent. And it wasn’t the actual pain of the jump that made him afraid to do it.

But he convinced himself that he had to go on, and his heart jumped, shoring strength. He had to check engineering. “Go now,” it told him and he obeyed.

It was a short jog down to an external ladder off the rear of the ship, a ladder you weren’t supposed to climb in any kind of rough sea let alone in the curling abyss of a captain-less ship. It led down to a room with windows, but it was hard for Jenkins to think about it any further. The mystery was down there, he knew, and his last instincts were telling him to find some answers to everything. Bodies, he thought, but that still didn’t seem possible because there was no direct connections between the mess and the cots to the engineering room. The bodies were there, nonetheless. But it was hard for Jenkins to think about it any further. And he could only think of the captain’s eyes as he had turn to go under the ship.

He made his way again on his hands and knees across the lurching, slick wood and found a rope that was secured to the aft prow and this allowed him to move faster with his eyes closed and his left hand gingerly reaching ahead for the boards.

He reached the wood and sat up slowly, holding onto the top rung of the aft ladder with everything he had left in him and his right entwined in the rope he had used to pull himself over. A sudden wave shot him up in the air, and he felt the oncoming of indefinite free-fall. And, while his loose leg flailed through the wind, he held tight.

“And I could let go – I could let go,” he thought.

“Captain!” he yelled down.

The view behind the ship held him in trance once he was on the ladder: the thick, sloshing, oily waves with thick heads of foam slapping the ship and hurling out of the darkness: the sudden shock when what seemed to be rapidly rolling fog materialized into a jet of hissing water: the sheets of rain that came down hard and from all different sides and impossibly melted into the waves as if they had never been; and the slimy, crashing darkness all above and all below: and knowing that there was so much so close beneath the water’s surface.

And do, down the ladder.

Every step he took he assumed would be his last. - Any second. Any second and I’ll be rolling, dark matter. I’ll be every different direction, I’ll be swift movement and dark stuff under the waves. But he was still on the ladder after each step.
Halfway down a sudden gust caught hold of him and his left hand slipped, but his right was there.
“And yet, it would be so easy.”

He pried himself into the engineering room with such a rapid move he had forgot about his fear. He made an exhausted, cautious swing with his legs and then lay panting on his stomach, feeling closer to the water than ever, almost part of the ship, and it took him some time to look up at the room because he kept expecting something to happen to him besides the jostles of the storm but nothing did. When he did look up around the room, the water in his left ear suddenly unclogged, pulling a warm sensation through his body, and he saw that this room was empty as well.
There were no bodies.

And everything started to twist together – the hull, the deck, the wood and the iron, the bridge to the wheelhouse and the ship finally started to skip haphazardly across the waves. The ship had taken on too much water and was no longer riding the waves – the ship would be going down or apart very soon. But that wasn’t what Jenkins was waiting for to happen.

The room twirled in darkness, and its gross emptiness even more so than in the crew’s quarters sharpened Jenkins’ senses.

The smell was unsea-like, it was salty and moist but dry and earthen, too. The battle of the wood and water seemed distant from here, like looking down onto a battle from a picnic on a hill. Jenkins’ heart sucked and trembled and expanded, and he knew that it would come for him here.

The snapping sound crashed from the darkness behind the boat and locked Jenkins’ eyes shut. It was followed a second time – a taught cable breaking in your face. It was followed a third time – a kick in your jaw.

And he could feel the monstrous presence, the shape that had always been watching him just out of his own view and had waited patiently for him because it had had time. Had he just discovered what the captain had known on the deck? Had it passed, this sudden understanding that had only now reached him, tacitly between the others above?

He tried to remember what he had seen in the captain’s eyes.

There was nothing but him and the sea and his fear, nothing but his dying pink body and the shredding black commotion beyond the wood paneling. And it was calling to him, the hungry, threatening shape. It promised oblivious if you would just do what it commanded and beyond the second of terrible pain from body in storm was the promise of white light and silences. Or else, he knew, you just had the fever of waiting for it to come to you.

It was here that Jenkins’ heart settled. A cool liquid stream of tingling numbness spread out through his blood in every direction and then back again. He was unaware of any contact between his back and the floor, or his hands on the wood, and there was just a great, deafening space above him, and he knew that his heart had given up like prey in the grasp of a predator and his eyes had probably gone calm.

Jump, the snap and the darkness commanded. Jump off the boat like all the rest.

His body felt like to first time you drank alcohol and it would be so easy now.

“No,” he said out loud, “no snuffing out and no silence in waves – just because you’ve given up. Just because you’ve decided I can jump.”

“I’m still here – and I’ll wait – for it,” he said again to his heart and the words echoed through the dull earthen room, his back flat against the wood and his fingers holding his stinging eyes open.