by P. W. Child
Nina laughed, wondering how Sam was going to explain the horror franchise to the sea master who could not care less about anything technologically entertaining. Joanne had just emerged from the shower, drying her hair. “What did I miss?” she asked when she saw Nina's smile.
“Oh, just Sam's foot-in-mouth disease taking Goose Bay by storm,” Nina giggled. “Are you ready, Miss Earle?”
“I am so fucking ready, honey!” the poor reclusive teacher beamed at the prospect of the adventure.
“Do you have the thing?” Nina whispered, checking for Sam in the vicinity.
“Of course I have the thing. How else are we going to get this guy to take us all the way up there on the North Atlantic?” she shrugged.
“I can’t believe you’re willing to part with it,” Nina sighed.
“It’s the only way we can pay for the trip, Nina,” Joanne reminded her.
“I know, I know, but…it once belonged to Alexander the Great, for Christ's sake! Do you know what that thing is worth?” Nina persisted in disbelief of the price her friend put on the opportunity to be part of an expedition.
“Listen, if what Erich the Mad said is true, there has to be more of these,” Joanne mentioned excitedly under her breath, holding up the medallion at Nina. Nina grabbed Joanne's hand and brought it down.
“Don't fucking flash it like that, Earle-girl. If one person here recognizes it we will have trouble, understand?” Nina warned. “It's just that it is so very valuable and worth way more than Virgil's entire fleet.”
“I get that,” Joanne explained. “But Alex had so many of these he wouldn’t miss this one if we gave it to a happy Canuck sailor, eh?”
“Stop making fun of Canadians, Jo,” Nina said playfully. “You’re one too, remember?”
“Which gives me special permission,” Joanne winked.
“Look, what if, God forbid, we don't find anything up there?” Nina exhaled laboriously. “That is a possibility.”
“You are used to this, love. I am as much paying for the adventure and the once in a lifetime experience as I am for the prospect of finding the treasure of one of the greatest and richest kings of ancient history.” Joanne smiled, in awe of what was happening to her. Resting her hands on Nina's shoulders she mused, “I don't know if that would make sense to someone like you, someone who gets to do what others only daydream of – to you it’s just another day. This is my only chance to live – really live – for once. Do you understand that?”
“Aye, more than you know,” Nina had to concede. She did know. When she’d been near death, riddled with radiation sickness and finding cancer knocking at her coffin lid, she’d felt the same…if she could just live, that would be enough. “I understand now. I do, Jo.” She took the coin from her friend and flicked it up in the air. When it landed on her palm Nina could feel the ancient magic of it infuse her. She smiled, holding it up to Joanne. “So let's go find the rest of the family, shall we?”
“Aye, aye!” Joanne yelled gleefully. With the place deserted and no boat in sight from the front door she looked around in confusion. “Great. So…where do I take my stuff?”
Chapter 22 – The Place of No Happening
It was close to 11am when they boarded Virgil's blue beauty, the Scarlet. The name of the vessel was just one of those peculiar things about Virgil, and Sam had the big man on camera before he could protest coyly.
“Well, I painted her blue because it was my late wife's favorite color. God, she loved blue. All her best dresses, her car, our bedroom, all blue,” he smiled. “She painted it herself; the room, not the boat. After she died in 2011, I painted the boat blue, even though it was named after my wife. I couldn't help that her name was Scarlet, right?”
“No,” Joanne smiled. “But it makes the coincidence so much sweeter, I think.”
“You do?” he asked, seeming taken aback that she was of the same mind as he. “That is so nice of you to say, Miss Earle. I always saw it the same way. Quirky is always interesting, hey?”
“I could not agree more,” Joanne concurred.
The robust sailor and the history teacher exchanged pleasant conversation for much of the first leg. He was a widower with seven charter boats and a fishing business, living the relaxed life in a remote and beautiful place.
From what Sam could gather, Virgil was a simple man, but by no means was he slow-witted. His innocence and naivety only made him more interesting, along with his powerful physique. His simple way of dealing with life, was what Sam, Nina, and Joanne all needed to learn, and Virgil was the master at it, a master only too willing to share his uncomplicated nature.
Joanne especially gained from his happy-go-lucky manner. She was a spinster with practically no life outside her classroom and here he was teaching her what no school could – the benefits of letting go of what you know and trusting the currents and tides to sweep you to the distant shores you once called home. To Nina's pleasant surprise, Joanne was quite comfortable with such a lesson.
“You think I've lost my biggest fan to the Goose Bay Gladiator here?” Sam asked Nina as he sat down next to her.
“Unmistakably so,” she answered, taking the beer he offered. “But I’m sure a suave heart breaker such as yourself should not have to venture far to find another maiden swooning.”
Sam gave her a long, intense look, the same way he always did before he kissed her.
“You reckon?” he asked, leaning forward to kiss her.
“I reckon,” Nina affirmed, pulling away just before his lips touched hers. Instead, she took a swig of beer from her bottle and looked across the waters. Sam maintained his position and just glared at her. “This is for the kiss in my cabin, right?” he sighed.
“Don't be daft,” she said, and turned her head toward Joanne and Virgil. “Wonder what she is telling him. He looks absolutely spellbound.”
Nina got up and walked over to Joanne, leaving Sam puckering and feeling stupid. Finally he just sighed, drank the rest of his beer in one go, and mumbled to himself. “You asked for that one, you big jessie.”
When Nina joined the other two she was not about to interrupt. Joanne was telling Virgil about things he had heard about before, but did not know much about. Sam soon joined just to be close to Nina after she’d jilted him so poetically.
“But I thought he was some sort of prince of Persia, some ass-kicking general,” the big sailor admitted. “I had no idea he was actually a king.”
“Who?” Sam asked.
Both women turned to him, their answers simultaneous. “Alexander the Great.”
Feeling a little singled out, Sam just nodded and stood back a bit, much like an exchange student at a new school. He drank his beer, enjoying the chill of the beautiful blue that lifted and plummeted them with the hull while Joanne shared her knowledge with Virgil.
“Alexander the Great won his first battle at age sixteen, only the first of an undefeated record he would have by the time he died at the ripe old age of thirty-three,” she relayed.
“Goddamn!” Virgil exclaimed. “I thought I was the main man when I caught my first arctic char at age five!”
Sam was filming some footage of the azure Atlantic stretch and close-ups of the beautiful historian, where she stood listening to her friend educate the captain of the vessel on Alexander the Great and his unmatched legacy.
“He is regarded as the greatest military genius of all recorded time,” Joanne said, taking a moment to drink her cold beer, something Nina found very amusing. Joanne had never liked alcohol, but between her crush, Sam, and her new interest, she appeared to have cultivated a taste for it.
“I think he was a narcissistic mama's boy,” Nina remarked.
“He was a genius, a man of vision and conquest,” Joanne countered.
“Aye, power-hungry to feed his ego. Philip II should have spent more time with his boy to teach him some bloody humility, instead of drinking himself into a stupor and being a shitty king,” Nina persisted.
Jo
anne stared at Nina in disbelief. “You have always hated Alexander. I remember back at the university you wrote this thesis on his misguided psychology being the reason for his…”
“Megalomania,” Nina finished her sentence for her. “I believe I said he was an ego-driven megalomaniac with too much time on his hands, who put too much effort into destroying empires when he could have uplifted the infrastructure and prosperity of his own Macedon. That is what I said. And I stand by it. Like those who rule the world of today, Alexander the Great was an egotistical fuckwit with too much money and no respect for the freedom of others.”
“He sounds like Hitler,” Virgil chuckled.
Nina applauded with a smile. “Thank you, Virgil!”
“A victor,” Joanne argued. “A great and powerful king who forgot he was just a fallible human.”
“Proving my point exactly. The bloke thought he was a god, born from a union his equally deluded mother had with Zeus. If that is not Hitler B.C. I don't know,” Nina jousted.
Sam zoomed in on the two women and casually commented, “The War of the History Hags.”
Virgil bellowed out a roar of laughter with Sam as the two woman scowled at the camera.
“Switch that off or…or…,” Nina thought of an acceptable threat, but Joanne helped her out, “…or you'll sleep with the fishes.”
“Aye!” Nina agreed loudly as the beer started going to her head. “Don't subject us to your judgment when you are standing on the sidelines.”
“Yes, you tell him, Nina. What do you know about ancient history? Nothing close to Nina and me,” Joanne bragged playfully to more exclamations of 'Aye!' from Nina in the background as the history teacher from Labrador City stalked Sam's lens seductively. “You know nothing, sir. Where history is concerned your head is like the place where nothing ever happens!”
“Aye!” Nina affirmed. “Wait, wait. You are on that again, Jo? Geez.”
“Good point!” Sam cried. “On that note; Virgil, have you ever heard of that myth?”
The captain leaned against the exterior of the cockpit, having a smoke. He offered Nina one, and she took two. She lit both and passed Sam the other.
“Thank you muchly,” he said from behind the camera. “Mr. Hecklund, you are a local. Have you ever heard of the patch of earth on the Labrador/ Newfoundland land that is reputed to be so cursed and desolate that nothing in history has ever happened there?”
“It's preposterous, Sam. Why do you even entertain that?” Nina said with her arms crossed.
Virgil smiled. “You know, when I was a teenager I had a pal I met during a Biology Camp at school. The guy was Inuit and he first told me about this. Is that where we’re going? Is that why you wanted to go to Martin Bay?”
Joanne cleared her throat. “Yes, but we’re going to look for a weather station there for our…documentary. The place where nothing happens, that story, that is just Sam's curiosity and Nina's skepticism we want to shed light on for.” She gave Nina a wink and Nina rolled her eyes in retort.
Virgil sighed and shrugged. “There is just this place off Martin Bay where they say nothing throughout history has ever taken place; that there is something wrong with the land and that no notable events or incidents, or even accidents or murders, ever happened there. Naturally, if you reckon the age of the planet, it is safe to assume that just about every square meter of land would at some point have been the site of a battle, or a murder, at least some happening, hey?”
“I agree,” Nina said.
“But, in this place,” he chuckled, “I feel stupid even saying this. In this place incidents refuse to happen.” Then Virgil laughed with such sorrowful perplexity that his passengers knew that there was more to his tale. He looked at them with a more serious expression, his face revealing that what he was about to say had some emotional effect on him.
“Look at the lens, Virgil,” Sam suggested gently.
The giant man with eyes like gray ice looked at the camera and took a deep breath. “In the summer of '94 I went up there with Jobie and two of his cousins,” Virgil's voice trembled. “We were having this same argument as you bunch, see? Like, how can nothing happen in a place. If it happens, it happens, right? So we went to the place. I told them I was going to walk onto the designated spot they claimed was the core of the Place of No Happening.”
Sam held up his hand for Virgil to wait and said, “Place of No Happening. Mark.” Sam's hand went into a rolling motion and Virgil carried on with the story. “Okay, so I told them, if I cut myself that would be a happening, right? I mean, we were not going to start a war just to test the myth.”
The clouds began to gather slowly, darkening the deck ever so slightly as if Mother Nature were introducing the mood of Virgil's chilling tale of illogical science. “I took out my knife to cut my hand,” the captain of the Scarlet said, smiling awkwardly, “and my knife…it would not cut. I swear to God, I can’t explain it to this day. It was in my hand but every time I brought it to cut my hand, it just stopped on my skin…just…sat there.”
“Really,” Nina smirked sarcastically.
“Really, Dr. Gould,” Virgil answered sincerely, almost defensively. “And if you go there for whatever reason you will eat your words on Mr. Cleave's camera. You will wear this stupid smile too, because you will not understand what happened, or did not happen, to you.”
“So, this patch of land is essentially anti-historical?” Sam joked, trying to lighten the mood, but the others were too immersed in the true and false of the matter to find the humor in it.
“That was not the end. Jobie and his one cousin thought my attempt was not conclusive, right, so they decided to beat the crap out of each other,” Virgil spoke as if it were the first time in his life that he could actually talk about it. “When Jobie tried to dive tackle his cousin his feet stopped. I mean, I could see his upper body lunge over from the speed he was going, but his feet would not advance to make contact. His cousin threw a punch which was guaranteed to connect, but Jobie's body had shifted a few inches away without any of us noticing! I’m telling you, that place scares the holy hell out of me, but I know what I saw and I know what I felt.”
“Oh my God, this is gold,” Sam exclaimed. “People are going to love this.”
“Just please, don't disclose the location, Mr. Cleave,” Virgil warned. “We don't want fools from all over the place disturbing Inuit land for some urban legend crap. Chalk this up to some old superstition on your program, alright?”
“Relax, Captain,” Sam replied professionally. “I appreciate the need for some arcane and magical places to stay unknown.”
“Aye, you can trust Sam,” Nina assured Virgil, giving the journalist a wink of approval that set everything right in his heart.
Chapter 23 – Unlikely Treasures
It was nighttime when the Scarlet pulled into a cove in Martin Bay. There the vessel bobbed on the breathing tide, a cold and restless heaving chest beneath the hull. The gales swept over the bay surface in hard breaths, sounding like wailing sirens and leaving the passengers of the boat thoroughly freaked out.
“God, this is creepy. This is right out of H.P. Lovecraft,” Nina remarked. “Hope your Alexander the Great makes it worth our while, Earle-Girl.”
“I hope so too,” Joanne replied as they lugged their bags off the boat and onto the dingy that would get them onto land. “Because I just don't think I can take more of your insults toward my boy Alex.”
The women dared have a laugh as they toiled through the icy waters to an unknown, uninhabited outpost in the stormy twilight. Sam asked Virgil to come along, but the captain preferred to stay with his vessel until his passengers returned. As the three of them started hiking, each one was armed with food rations and basic clothing, along with whatever gear Sam needed to record what they would hopefully discover there.
“Why the hell would Alexander's treasure be out here in the godforsaken Arctic archipelago?” Nina huffed in the cold.
“Think about it,�
� Sam shrugged. “It is nowhere near his Kingdoms, right? Nobody would think to plunder here.”
“That is true. He was a master of misdirection and strategy as much as he was good at head-on attacks,” Joanne agreed.
“But his treasure, most of which he obtained from empires he toppled, like Persia, Syria, and Egypt, could not possibly have been hauled all the way here. And let's not deny it – he was not afraid of a fight, hardly the type to sneak around to hide his gold when he believed he practically owned everything anyway,” Nina debated. “He would not have bothered to conceal his treasure at all. I would imagine Alexander the Great would have more than enough soldiers to guard his hoard instead of hiding it.”
“Unless that hoard contained something more important than gold and silver,” Sam mentioned.
“You know, that could be a strict possibility,” Nina conceded. “Perhaps something more powerful was hidden among his treasures, because most pillagers would only see the gold and valuables and not pay attention to the real item that he treasured.”
“Which would be?” Sam asked. Neither of the ladies could come up with a speculative answer yet, both falling silent to consider what it could be.
“Look!” Sam cried out. “Just ahead, a bit to the right. See that? Is that the weather station Erich spoke of?”
They squinted through the pitch dark with only the weak beams of flashlights to light the way. But in the haze of the cold, misty weather appeared what looked like compact, temporary structures showing signs of severe disrepair. There were two identical buildings constructed side by side with a large mess of iron and copper wiring hidden behind the weathered walls.
“Super creepy,” Joanne said with a shiver.
“Yep,” Sam answered. “Go on ahead, ladies. I'll film you from behind.”
“Not funny, Sam. We all go together, alright?” Nina suggested.
“I think those iron rods used to be a tower to mount weather instruments,” Sam remarked as they came closer to the deserted post. “This must be where Erich and his colleagues loaded the boats. Look, on the other side of this ridge there is more ocean hugging the land. That must be were the U-boat is submerged.”
