by Seven Jane
While these changes were happening to Tom, I saw that changes were also happening to my father, as if the process affected both men in tandem, pulling life from one and passing it into the other. Where it touched Tom, the dark grey skin of my father’s hand was lightening, the solid grey fading to a hazy, fog-like consistency that fractured and crackled, recasting itself from the smooth flesh of a man’s arm and into gleaming silver scales. By the time Tom’s mouth opened to inhale a replenishing lungful of air, so many scales had consumed my father’s hand that it looked as if he wore a glove made from the body of a fish. As I studied him closely, I realized more scales had also been added to the collection at his throat, and his tentacle-like hair was longer, the edges of his short beard curling in toward themselves to form new tendrils at the edge of his jaw. A row of acorn barnacles lined the side of his face.
“You did not tell me what this would cost you,” I said as what was left of my father dissolved further into a relic of the sea.
To which he replied, withdrawing his hand as he did, “My fate is sealed, love. But perhaps there is redemption for me yet.”
He stood and stepped backward so I could settle into the space he’d left. I wanted to ask questions about what had occurred, what sort of transmission had taken place that had traded life from my father into the man on the bed, but I did not. Instead, I took Tom’s head in both of my hands, cradling him gently as I turned his face to me. His eyes were heavy and half lidded, the whites that showed glassy and shiny in the same way that a dead animal’s eyes might gleam when they rolled upward, unseeing. His lips were parted ever so slightly, sipping small breaths too small and shallow even to raise his chest in a full intake of air.
I waited anxiously for Tom to open his eyes, to speak so that I could hear his calm, friendly voice saying “Oi, Rivers” as it was want to do, and I gasped, excited as he moved his hand to clasp mine. His eyelids fluttered and then breath caught and died in my throat as they opened fully, revealing not brilliant green eyes the color of the saltwater, but dull, grey, soulless eyes instead. Tom Birch, or the thing that had taken his form, stared at me, through me, and there was no recognition in his eyes.
XIX
I did not see what happened next. I was ushered quickly out of the cabin by Dunn and Winters as they left the strangely silent version of Tom Birch with his new, unwilling captain. I had questions, innumerable questions, but as was becoming all too common had not the time or opportunity to ask them in the flurry of mysterious activity that continued to surround me since the moment we’d found ourselves on the frozen sea.
Winters, still angry, glared at me as he pushed out of our assembly and made his way in swift, furious steps toward the forecastle of the ship where he climbed the small flight of stairs and took watch out over the bowsprit. I watched him go, and then felt Dunn at my elbow.
“Don’t trouble yerself, lass,” he mused, eyes affixed to some point far over the water, staring at something that I could not see as he peered hard with the same sightless stare of someone peering into their own thoughts. “Between Winters and Jones, I’ve always found Erik Winters to be the more reasonable of the two.”
I wasn't sure if this was meant to comfort or terrify me. It had the effect of both. “And what of Tom?” I asked. “What is that thing he has become? He looks like a ghost still possessed with life, but not like the man I had known at all … something else, something other, and it aches to my very soul to see him like so. Would it have been the same if I had done it—‘saved him’ as you said? What happens now?”
The questions came as a rush, and Dunn rubbed his palm across his face in the way that I was only just now beginning to realize meant that he was troubled. “I don't rightly know,” he admitted. “But what I do know is this: the sea does not give back what is taken from it lightly, no matter who it is that do the taking, and especially if they be called Jones.”
“Why?” I demanded. “Why is this so? Everyone—you, the captain, even my father—speaks in riddles of curses, naming the sea as if she is some jealous goddess, and yet no one provides any answers or details to their stories. I am tired of this incomplete information, these tempting, partial legends.” It was delicious, this speech as it came out of me, and Dunn listened consideringly, although he made no move to speak, still watching intently over my shoulder. He was always watching and waiting, and I never knew for what, and it infuriated me. “Tell me,” I demanded. “Give me answers. I know you know.”
“There is only one person who knows enough to tell you the whole tale,” he said. “More than Winters and Jones and I, than the three of us put together. And if we ever reach her, aye, then I imagine she will.”
“Evangeline.”
“Aye.” A faint smile relaxed his face as he repeated the name in dreamy voice. “Evangeline.”
“Who is she to you?” I asked. “A daughter, a sister, a lover—these things she is to the rest of us onboard this ship, but who is she to you, Mister Dunn? I’m not sure about the other men of the crew, but I understand enough to know that she is more than a simple island proprietress to you. How does your story connect with hers, and with mine? And with Tom Birch’s?”
He opened his mouth to respond, but as he did a sudden shock rocked through the ship. It seemed to originate from the captain’s quarters, and shuddered so violently that for a moment I thought we’d run aground, though of course we had not. It had started and ended within the space of a single heartbeat, and I watched with mesmerized curiosity as the rippling effect of the shudder moved out across the water in small, purposeful waves, and when I had regained control of my thoughts, I drew the sword from my belt, prepared to fight.
“You can put that away, lass,” said Dunn, and I noticed that a look of terror had seized his features as whatever he had been waiting and waiting for had finally appeared. “It’s the Caleuche. The ship of the damned. She comes to claim her captain, and her crew, and let’s hope that’s all she be takin’.”
The name of the Caleuche was—like that of Davy Jones or of Charybdis—one I had only read about in legends of the demons of the sea or heard in terse whispers in the recounting of nightmares from old sailors who had seen the ocean at its most terrifying. And like these other legends, the story of the Caleuche was every bit as chilling, although there were rumors that it had not always been this way. It was said to be a beautiful, luminescent ship of no equal, with blood-red sails, and a gleaming white hull. The Caleuche was believed to be a vessel of its own sentience, a pet of some sea goddess who kept the ship as an instrument of her power and of her favor. In days past, so long ago now that it had mostly passed from memory, the ship had been said to be a merry one, allowing those worthy ones who had died at sea to sail in eternity. It sailed the world, ferrying those who had died at sea to their resting places as it traded, making merchants and buyers wealthy beyond measure. But the sea had grown resentful of men, and so she had given the Caleuche another mission. Now it sailed as a ghost ship, crewed with the souls of the damned and possessing of the abilities to glide across the surface of the water at impossible speeds or to sail beneath its waves, rising to gulp and swallow men with the same omnivorous, indifferent appetite as a whale. It kept, according to the tales, men it deemed of sufficient cruelty and evil desires to fill its crew while it spilled the others, driven half-mad by the experience, upon the banks of beaches as it passed.
The sound of music—a wailing, clanging sort of melody—announced the ship as she lifted from the water, rising to her full height beside the Riptide, a magnificent ship bearing three masts of five sails each, and all red as blood as described by her legends. She was fashioned in the style of a Spanish galleon, wide decked and with a thick hull made for bearing down on her enemies while they fired uselessly against her. She appeared constructed entirely of driftwood—beautiful, pale, gleaming driftwood if such a thing were real—that shone like radiant starlight against the deep green of the sea as the water ran from her masts and she settled lightly
atop the waves, a drowned and shining thing freshly risen from where she’d sailed on some underwater lake. There were dozens of gun ports on her starboard side, so many that I lost count, but there must have been at least two dozen, perhaps three, each covered by a circular, copper shell bearing the shape and detail of a sand dollar. The effigy of a woman, more beautiful even than the likeness of Evangeline Dahl on the Riptide, adorned her figurehead, a painted stretch of red across where its eyes should have been.
A line of men stood at her rail, if one was bold enough to call them men. Indeed, they were of a similar hue and substance as what formed Captain Davy Jones, but he was solid and dense and whatever affected him did not touch the other men. These shimmery, spectral images had the shape of men but were brittle, fragile looking things that seemed as if they could be disrupted entirely with the passing of too much air, like loosely cobbled clouds of mist and ash. Their clothing and weapons were unfixed, not glistening exactly, but stretched somehow so that they appeared thin and partially translucent like bits of canvas that had spent too much time battered by the wind and had begun to come apart at the seams. These strange apparitions were identical to what I had seen become of Tom, grey shadows imbued with life, but I noticed as I watched them that they had the tendency to take on the colors of the water and sky around them, even the red of the sails. So at first glance they might have appeared iridescent, even pretty in the right light if you could disregard their somber expressions and listless eyes. I could see how they might have indeed been beautiful if the Caleuche had ever really been kind.
These men, nearly fifty in all, stood shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the Caleuche, all of them with dull, unseeing eyes trained across the thin bit of water that separated the two ships. One of these mist-shaped men standing in the center of the line was cranking a hurdy gurdy, an unusual, clunky sort of wooden, stringed instrument that generated sound as the player cranked a rosined wheel which, in turn, rubbed against strings as might a violin bow. This misshapen instrument was capable of producing melodies ranging from delicate, tickling percussion sounds and the melodies of wailing bagpipes, to deep, undulating drones with drifting, screeching, buzzing harmonics. I could easily see how such an odd and unpredictable arrangement of sounds could be mistaken for the cackles of demonic laugher from a vessel crewed by the damned, or the spellbinding music of an enchanted ship or a siren’s call. Currently, the music pouring forth from the malformed wooden instrument was lively and celebratory, a queer juxtaposition to the silent, somber expression of the ship’s ghosts, and I suspected this had something to do with the fact that a new member had been added to the crew of the Caleuche in the form of Tom Birch. Its call was loud, much louder than it naturally should have been, as if it were being amplified in some way so that it drowned out all other sound, not that there was any.
Not a soul on the Riptide moved as the large, hulking mass of the Caleuche completed its ascent above water, settling herself alongside the starboard side of the leaner ship as its ghastly crew stared, the sound of the hurdy gurdy the only noise heard on the otherwise silent sea. Though comparable in size, the Caleuche was, as Spanish galleons to English galleons were, stouter and more dominating than the Riptide, making her appear smaller in the shadow of the bulkier ship, but what the Riptide might lack in heft she made up for in speed, both in maneuverability and in the effective use of her cannons, a strategy that was vastly different than the tactics that would be applied by the gleaming, driftwood ship. The victor of a battle between the two ships would largely depend on the skill of its captain, which between Winters and Jones might have been equally matched.
Winters had reappeared at my side, eyes sparking ruefully as he took in the ghost ship before him.
“What do we do, Cap’n?” A large, hulking man rushed to the captain’s side, clearly in a panic. His name, I knew, was Mister Elias O’Quinn, and he was the ship’s gunner. He had a hooked nose and one of his eyes dragged behind the other, giving his face a sour expression that was perpetually darkened by a smear of ash and gunpowder. He skin was pallid and drawn, and his cheeks were rather gaunt despite his large size, giving him the look of a slightly rotted piece of fruit that had begun to pucker and concave upon itself. He was rarely seen above deck, preferring to remain below and in the company of his cannons and shot and gunpowder, and when he was above deck he was never without his powder monkey, a small, wiry boy of no more than fourteen or fifteen, called Bim, who followed him dutifully like a parasitic pilot fish. “We ’an run a shot across the bow?” He offered this with obvious excitement, either oblivious or undaunted by the fact that he was suggesting firing a warning shot at a ship piloted by the dead.
“No,” responded Winters, who evidently took umbrage with the comment. “They mean us no harm. They have only come to reclaim what is theirs. We have no quarrel with them for now.”
The gunner looked put out. “And what is that they be claimin’?” he asked, and then he and Bim stepped back as the hurdy gurdy hit a powerful chord and with it the door to the captain’s office swung open, and Davy Jones walked out, followed closely behind by the brittle grey shadow that had once been Tom Birch. Neither of them said a word and spared not so much as a glance in our direction as they walked in lock step across the waist of the ship and then stepped up and over the railings, dropping into the water below as we watched. Their bodies made no sound as they slipped beneath the water, and in a blink of the same ethereal green light that had preceded Charybdis’ swirling throat, the entirety of the Caleuche vanished, disappearing so completely it was hard to imagine that she had ever been there. Even the water was flat and glassy where she had rested atop the water. The sudden silence was deafening.
And then O’Quinn let out a bellow of startled sound, and then Bim produced a high-pitched wail, and this was joined quickly by the startled cries of the other men as they rushed the rail of the ship, looking over her edges into the deeps for a sign of the two men, or perhaps the ship. But there was no sight of them, and no evidence that any man had been there, alive or grey ghost or anything else. There was chaos then, as every man in the crew yelled and pounded against the ship, weapons clanging and feet stomping in frenzied, disorganized sound that was worse even than the vaporing. Winters, Dunn, and I stood, staring at the empty space left by the strange, sentient ship captained if only in title by the man who had once been Davy Jones. We said nothing, and did nothing, letting the rest of the men swarm around us as if they were no more than a cast of thumping, scuttling crabs until finally the Captain’s voice boomed above the racket.
“Quiet,” he demanded. He pulled a spyglass from his frog on his belt and lifted it to his eye, and when he lowered it a wrathful smile was spread across his face. He pointed his forefinger in the direction he had been studying. A mass had appeared on the horizon, a large, blurry bulk of mist and earth of indistinct shape and topography, but it was unmistakable nonetheless. Land.
“Bracile,” he whispered beneath his breath. Then, “Land, ho!” he shouted, and the men instantly forgot what they had been upset about and clung again to the edges of the ship, this time with mouths agape in wonder. Winters said nothing but the smile stayed stretched menacingly across the space between his ears, and he kept his eyes fixed on Bracile in a manner that suggested total and complete anticipation, so fiercely intent and unwavering that it might, in fact, be a look not of expectation at all, but of insanity.
I thought of Evangeline, the source of both his anticipation and his madness. I thought of her waiting, trapped on an unreachable island, but beyond that the vision was unclear. “Did she know who I was … who I am?” I asked Dunn, who was still beside me.
“I expect you will soon be able to ask her yourself. If we e’er reach the island that is.”
“If we reach the island?” I repeated.
“This island be guarded by a fearsome beast, Miss Jones,” Dunn explained. “And she knows we be here. Question now be whether she will allow us safe passage ’til she be rea
dy to claim us.”
XX
Each of us kept our sights locked on the blurry mass of land ahead as we sailed along in soundless wonder, our worries over monsters of the deep or of demon ships crewed by the dead and the damned momentarily forgotten as we beheld the shape of what was surely the fabled island of Bracile looming before us. The ocean was so silent you could hear the soft, creaking sounds of the wooden ship as she swayed and groaned beneath us, moving so swiftly atop the waves that salty sea spray covered our faces like morning dew. Although the wind was still, we rushed forward at our maximum speed of about eight knots, the ship pushing ahead quickly despite the lack of any strong breeze so that she might have moved of her own accord, or of Winters’, who stood staring ahead wearing the look of a starved man facing an oncoming feast. The men had abandoned their frantic pummeling and no one stirred on the decks other than the few who took turns managing the quotidian tasks of adjusting sails and pulling on rigging, exercising the same speed and thoroughness they would have if Tom Birch had still been onboard to direct them. The rest of us simply stared in anticipation—some mixed with looks of awe, others with dread—as we approached land ahead.
I gasped when the mist around the island cleared, pushed out of the way by the breath of the ship, and I saw her plainly for the first time. Even the brilliant blue waters of the Caribbean could not compare to the unrivaled beauty of the waters that lay at the feet of Bracile. The ocean around her was a rich tapestry of colors spun from the vibrant hues of jewels: deep emerald greens, brilliant sapphire blue, and crisp, luminescent turquoise, all of these mixed together and then fading into fair, almost crystalline waters of pure aquamarine as they touched the edges of the island. Even in the bright daylight sun I could see the glittering sparkle of bioluminescent bays that twinkled and turned to frothy white foam as they lapped against the edges as delicately as a bridal train.
