The Magical Book of Wands

by Raven M. Williams

  Turning back toward the room’s low end, I made out what appeared to be a roughly waist high, boxy shape between the bed frame and the ship’s hull. It had to be the safe, I thought. I took a single step toward it, but stopped when a shadow fell over me. It passed quickly, but another followed, flitting by much quicker than had the first. Arching my back to look up through the irregular opening, I saw nothing but the sun’s light on the surface now almost fifty feet above my head.

  Those shadows had passed much too quickly to be another boat or ship, so I ran through a mental catalog of the local sea life. Like anyone else who makes his living either on or under the water, I had heard tales of preposterously large fish, but had never seen any such thing in the Mississippi or any other river or lake. I also knew that the James River, of which Hampton Roads Harbor was a part, opened onto the Atlantic Ocean, but I instantly discounted the spectacular notion that a shark might have swum by. Both the James and the harbor were more fresh than salty, making it unsuitable for such terrifying creatures. I briefly fancied it might have been a porpoise or dolphin, but decided it had likely been nothing more than clumps of seaweed floating by in the current.

  That settled in my mind, I clomped across the cabin to the bed’s frame and easily pulled it away, disturbing a few more crabs in the process. When the storm of particulate matter settled, I saw it was indeed the safe I had come looking for. Unfortunately, it proved too heavy for me to lift with my gloved hands. I finally resorted to pushing it end over end until it lay upright again beneath the opening. I used the rope tied at my waist to truss the heavy thing up in the same manner as I had the cannons before.

  All that left me unable to see through my fogged ports. As I sucked and spat harbor water until I could again see what little could be made out in that dim, shadowy place, I fancied I felt the currents strengthening around me. It struck me as odd, given that the wreck should have shielded me from the worst of them, but I was too focused on my goal to be bothered with it. Then, as I reached to tug on the rope for the men above to raise the safe, I detected what appeared, astonishingly enough, to be a pair of much larger fish now circling about me in the captain’s cabin.

  I actually exclaimed “Good Lord!” the sound of my own voice in the bronze helmet startling me almost as much as had the unexpected and fantastic sight. Those fish were nearly as large as I, but of course I knew they were not really fish at all. I could tell that by their skinny, finned arms and their narrow, elongated heads that sat upon necks rather than merging into their bodies. From their “waists” down, though, they did indeed resemble fish, with long and slender tails that swished side-to-side in the manner of a shark. The sight of such an impossible creature rendered me frozen in place, too stunned to move or utter any other sound beyond my initial exclamation.

  All the while, as I stood gaping at them, they spiraled in closer to me with what appeared to be unadorned malevolence in their bulbous, uniformly black eyes. Only when they simultaneously drew slender rods from a sheath upon their mottled and finned forearms did I regain a semblance of my former intellect. Those rods, each at least as long as my own forearm, gleamed with a wicked light at their narrow tips. When they pointed them at me, I deduced that whatever they were, those two fish-men meant to do me no good.

  I grasped the rope rising up to the surface in one shaking, gloved hand and tugged three times hard upon it in the prearranged signal for the men on Screamin’ Betsy’s deck to haul it up. A scant fraction of a moment later, I managed to wrestle one of my booted feet up to the top of the safe. The combination of those two swift motions sent those new arrivals dancing back a foot or so, but their wands, if you will accept my use of the fanciful word, remained pointed directly at my breast. When the rope jerked taut and then proceeded to raise the safe and I from the deck, I hugged it tight to my chest with both hands.

  I nearly made good in my escape, but toppled off the still-rising safe at the painful sensation of a hundred hot needles burying themselves into my knees as I cleared the opening. Yelping from the pain, I landed supine on the deck with my legs still in the hole from the knees down. The fiery agony passed quickly, thank God, but a numbness replaced it, as if my legs had fallen asleep. Even so, I could not mistake the feeling of spidery appendages, the fish-men’s hands I supposed, gripping at my boots and the waterproofed canvas leggings attached to them.

  Scuttling backward on my rump and elbows, I fought to extricate myself from that unholy grip. My thrashing sent silt and bits of weed swirling around me. Above, I saw the safe ascending unimpeded toward the broken light of the surface that silhouetted Elizabeth Loud’s hull.

  When I succeeded in breaking free of the three-fingered, webbed hands, I twisted onto my stomach and pulled myself along the deck toward the safety of my diving bell. Before I could reach it, another bubbling sizzle rushed over my head, and I watched through the partly fogged port as one of the lines securing the bell to Florida was severed. Through my left port, I saw that the other line remained intact, but that more of the nightmarish, shark-like figures were swimming through the murky water toward it...and me.

  I knew they would reach the bell before I could, encumbered as I was by my heavy diving boots and a physiology not made for fast motion through water, so I did the only thing I could—I tumbled off the wreck’s side and into the tall weeds.

  Looking up as my boots dragged me down, I saw the two fish-men I had first encountered poke their narrow, bulbous-eyed heads over the side. Then the weeds closed over me, taking their horrible visages from my sight. Along with them went my fresh air.

  About the time I landed on the bottom, completely enshrouded by the weeds and billowing clouds of silt, I realized that my leather air hose had become hopelessly twisted, leaving me nothing to breathe but the meager portion of air inside my suit and helmet, and my own poisonous exhalations. Due to my fright, shock, and exertions, to say nothing of the way my breaths came short and almost unbearably hot, I surmised I had already used up most of what remained.

  Some feeling, painful as it was, had returned to my legs by that time. I paid it no heed, however, as I was far more concerned with either suffocating or being killed by whatever it was that the fish-men’s sticks shot. Rising to my feet, I twisted about in a clockwise fashion a few times. When I still felt no fresh air coming in through the hose, I twisted the other way an equal number of times, and then a few more.

  Glory be to God in Heaven, that did the trick! I sucked in a few deep lungfuls of air before another panicked thought occurred to me. While I could breathe once more, the hose bringing that sweet, life-preserving air to me rose directly up to the ship. While the weeds did an admirable job of concealing me from those dreadful fish-men, the hose, by necessity, pointed directly to my whereabouts. If they did not choose to simply kink the hose and suffocate me, the fish-men could merely follow it to me and then do as they wished. A quick look up revealed that port was now hopelessly fogged, and I dared not take the time to clear it.

  Knowing my time was short, if indeed I had any left at all in which to save myself, I charged forward as best I could, out of the thickest of the weeds. As soon as I did, I nearly ran right into another of the monsters. More on instinct than bravery, I snapped up a gloved fist and punched the fellow directly in his squishy, narrow face. Even slowed by the water’s resistance, it seemed enough to stun the monster badly enough that he dropped his stick, which had been pointed straight at my chest.

  The long, pointy thing descended slowly toward the silt as its owner convulsed, a frothy cloud of some ichor or other issuing from a slot between its unblinking, obsidian eyes. I snatched up the stick in hopes of keeping my enemy from using it against me, should he regain his self-control before I could escape. I had no clear idea how the thing worked, but had already been stunned by one such weapon and seen another sever one of the ropes anchoring my bell. I only hoped I would not accidentally shoot myself, as I had grabbed it with the “business end” still aimed toward me.

 
I bulled my way past the twitching wretch and out of the weeds, but felt myself yanked backward almost immediately. Twisting about even as I arched my back to look up, I saw another of the fishy monsters pulling himself down the hose toward me. Though none of them seemed capable of showing emotion in their ghastly, mottled countenances, I read a certain fury in his face as he descended, his own wand pointed to strike at me.

  I knew not whether he meant to stun or slice, and neither did I find out. Before he could do either, I pointed the other’s wand at him and squeezed hard upon its base. How it did, I cannot say, as the things possessed nothing like a trigger, but a stream of sizzling bubbles shot out its end and struck him squarely in what I shall call his chest, though only because it was between his two long, spindly and finned arms. I barely managed to stagger backward out of his way before he plummeted headfirst into the muck at my feet, more of the dark ichor staining the water a dark-greenish tint.

  While I should have been trying to hide, or else devise some manner of signaling to the crew of Elizabeth Loud, I instead stood transfixed as the otherworldly creature thrashed around in what had to have been its death throes, given the amount of “blood” that issued from the wound I had made. This may come as a shock to you, but I, who fought through the entirety of the American Civil War, had never once taken the life of another. There, though, at the bottom of Hampton Roads Harbor some three years after the war’s end, I took the life of a creature that, while not human, surely possessed at least as much intelligence as any man. Watching that creature die, which I have since deduced could not possibly have been native to this earth, I felt every bit a murderer, even as I knew the creature had meant to do the same to me.

  Then something stupendous occurred. The first of those two creatures, seemingly recovered from my blow to its face, sped past me to attend to its fellow monster, whose twitching had begun to lessen. It recovered the other’s wand, clearly broken by its impact on the bottom, and aimed it not toward me but toward its fallen fellow. With a peculiar twisting motion of its hand, an amber glow pulsed out from the bent tip toward the ragged and bleeding wound. The glow appeared to close the wound some tiny bit before it flickered and then vanished without finishing the job. I had every opportunity to blast them both then, but what the strange fish-man did next stopped me. Rather than attack, the creature instead wrapped one skinny arm about its companion and reached the other out toward me. I could not interpret that gesture as anything but an obvious entreaty for me to help it.

  To this day, I cannot explain exactly why I felt that way, but a sudden understanding possessed me that, if I were to do as it wished, the fish-man would assist me in avoiding the others. Though a large part of my mind screamed at me to finish them both off, I surrendered my only weapon, offering it blunt end first as if it were a knife or pistol. The fish-man cocked its head at me in a supremely dog-like gesture, but then accepted the wand.

  The thing then gave it a shake and a twist before turning it upon its fellow. With a squeeze, the same golden-orange light emanated from its tip and traveled toward the wound. As before, the wound shut before my eyes, the flow of ichor abating until no opening remained in the mottled flesh. Barely a moment later, the previously mortally wounded fish-man stirred and turned its bulging eyes up toward its companion first, and then over to me. Again, I felt an inexplicable connection with them. A sense of confusion flowed over my mind from the one, and of relief from the other, before an unlikely sort of understanding passed between the three of us.

  The sense was short-lived though, for I detected the shadow shapes of more of the fish-men slicing over the tops of the tall weeds. I could not be certain if they saw me yet, but it seemed logical to assume their large eyes could penetrate the murk far better than my own. At any rate, the pair before me did something then that I have since only ever been able to guess at their motives in doing it. Before I could even react, the healthier of the two, the one I had punched, released its friend and pressed the wand back into my hand before taking the other and hauling me back into the weeds with a frenzied lashing of its tail.

  Even with the weight of my boots and helmet, and the drag induced by my long length of air hose, the creature dragged me along with seeming ease. Soon, Florida’s dark hull flashed by as we rose up toward its top deck. Twisting about in my assailant-turned-rescuer’s grip, I saw more than a half-dozen of the monsters in pursuit, their own wands raised toward me. Most held their fire, I assume to avoid injuring one of their own, but two of them did not. Both shots were the same fizzing bubbles of instantly boiling water that had severed one of my diving bell’s mooring lines. Luckily, they missed.

  Then we soared above Florida’s stern, barely ten feet from the comparative safety of my bell. Three more of the monsters lingered nearby, as if guarding it. Rather than oppose us, they backed off, their wands raised but not firing. I could only guess that they did so in response to the sight of a wand in my own hand. Perhaps, I considered, the one had given it back to me in order to appear as if it were my hostage, rather than my rescuer.

  In a flash of bubbles and swirling water, I burst up through the bottom of my bell and into breathable air. As I scrambled onto my operator’s bench, my legs still hanging down into the water along with the fish-man’s lower half and my air hose, the creature snatched the wand from me, waved it about in a curious gesture, and then returned it to me blunt end first. Whatever it had done, the tip glowed with an intensely golden light that lit up the inside of the bell before dimming. The last thing it did was to place the three, rubbery fingers of one of its hands directly onto the front port of my helmet and then peered in between them. For a fleeting moment, I thought I detected the ghost of a smile curving that fishy mouth, but then it was gone in a great splash of water.

  Stunned as I was, I wasted no time in fussing with my helmet or the hose. I simply threw a pair of levers that released my ballast weights and sent the bell rocketing up to the surface like a bullet from a gun, the one rope holding it to the rail insufficient to stop it. On the way up, I unlocked and removed my helmet while trying to maintain my grip on the wand. I prayed that the bell would not rise directly into Screamin’ Besty’s keel and then overturn, depositing me right back into the same macabre predicament I had only so narrowly escaped.

  Luck was with me. As the bell popped into clear air, I grabbed a cork float in one hand and slid back into the water before my cast iron contraption could sink, dragging me back down with it. Clinging to the float for dear life, I screeched and screamed for Elizabeth Loud’s crew to throw me a line. I swallowed quite a bit more of Hampton Roads’ nasty harbor water than I liked in the process, but the men reacted with admirable speed and soon hauled me back up, safe at last from my terrifying adventure.

  Knowing that no one would believe my story, I tucked the wand into my underwear through the corselet’s helmet collar just before I set feet upon Elizabeth Loud’s deck.

  “The wood was more rotten than I had expected,” I lied in response to their urgent questions while they helped me out of my diving suit, gloves, and boots. “Immediately after signaling for the safe to be hoisted, the forward bulkhead collapsed, trapping me beneath it. Once I managed to extricate myself and get back up on the deck, a current swept me over the side.”

  I hoped that that last would sufficiently explain the movement of my air hose well away from the wreck, which I imagined they had to have noticed. I thought it all to be a reasonably believable explanation, and prayed it might also discourage anyone else from diving on the wreck to discover the horrible truth. To a man, they all seemed to accept my story.

  Later, with the bell retrieved and stowed in its cradle on the deck, along with the safe and cannons I had retrieved, I went to my cabin under the pretense of cleaning up and making myself presentable. While Screamin’ Betsy made for her berth at the wharves on the Norfolk side of the harbor, I did in fact enjoy a sponge bath before changing into something better than my filthy, stained long johns. Afterward, I perched
myself on the edge of my bunk and studied the strange wand, which continued to vibrate ever so slightly in my hands.

  MAY 30, 1972

  My bus has arrived in the greater Norfolk, Virginia area, and is now winding its way through the outlying towns, the crowding and urban squalor increasing as we go.

  After my harrowing experience at the bottom of Hampton Roads Harbor, I returned as well I could to my old life. A learned man like my benefactor before me, I felt a sense of exhilaration at the firsthand knowledge that mankind shared the Earth with creatures in possession of intelligence close to, if not exceeding, our own. I am also, however, a realist. As advanced as the fish-men I had encountered were, their overall demeanor was no less antagonistic than that of humanity. At their first approach, my immediate reaction had been to run from them. They had chosen to assault me in turn, using the weapons they had at their disposal. Had I not eventually responded in kind, I might never have survived the encounter. At the very least, they might have taken me prisoner and forced me to live out my life in some fish-man’s equivalent of an aquarium.

  In the end, I decided never to tell anyone of what had transpired on, in, and around the wreck of CSS. Florida. After all, nothing can be more detrimental to a businessman’s success than being perceived a lunatic. In addition, I believed with all my heart that the fish-men’s level of scientific advancement exceeded our own. Considering that, it seemed foolhardy to foster any further contact with them, so I kept it a secret even from my wife and child.

  After I delivered the cannons and the safe—the secret contents of which I never did learn—to the federal government, the money earned proved enough not only to secure a plot of land in the mountains outside of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, but also to perform some modifications to my diving bell. Inspired by my adventure, I added a second chamber to my original design, allowing the diver to exit the bell through a floodable chamber while also providing safety to anyone remaining inside. Naturally, I described the nature of any such external danger as being a shark or octopus, but I knew better.