The Coming of the Whirlpool

by Andrew McGahan

  No, it was impossible. Dow could not go back. No one could ask him to go back. Surely he had only imagined that look on Nathaniel’s face anyway, that achingly sane stare, so lost, so forsaken. The old man had sought the whirlpool willingly, had he not? So leave him there.

  But an unforgiving presence within Dow refused to accept such excuses. Because in truth he could go back. He understood the workings of the whirlpool now, he could decipher its currents and ride them if he so chose. And he had the wind at his disposal should he need to flee once more.

  Only, he was afraid . . .

  Dow raised his gaze, almost beseeching, to the Heads. He could not see anyone, but surely the folk of Stromner were still watching him from the heights, and the people of Stone Port, and the Ship Kings too. And yet, what help or guidance could any of them give? He was alone upon the sea, and he alone knew the whirlpool’s ways. If Nathaniel was to be saved, only Dow could do it.

  And slowly the full force of that thought came to him. He was alone upon the sea. Had he not wished for exactly this, as a boy, when he’d first spied the ocean from the headland? And now here he was, despite all the obstacles that had been placed in his way, sailing free in the face of storm and gale, master of his own boat, and voyaging where even the mighty Ship Kings feared to go. Moreover, he was a man now, and it was within his power to save another man’s life.

  Dow took a deep breath, then set his course.

  His fear had not left him, no. But he held the rudder firm until the cliffs of East and West Heads lifted stark before him on either hand, and the swell of the whirlpool’s rim rose up again before the bow.

  He knew what he must do; as the boat climbed, Dow swung it hard to the left, so that he would enter the maelstrom against the rotation. He came atop the lip once more, and in the moment before the descent began he stared out and down across the whirling void, searching for one thing. There! A mote hanging low in the maelstrom’s depths, spinning about the very brink of the funnel’s mouth; the skiff . . .

  Then the Maelstrom was diving down, cutting a path across the racing current as sharply as a knife. Spray flew; the wind was a thin wail above the thunder. And as Dow descended, the maelstrom reared up immense on all sides, the air growing darker, the waters blacker, as if no light could reach down so far from the sky. The tiller bucked against his palm, and only the boat’s reckless speed prevented it from being swept away around the circle.

  Steeper and steeper became the incline, and now the Maelstrom was canted so severely that Dow had to brace himself against toppling forward. He was nearing the mouth of the funnel, the horizon beyond which there was only the final fall into ruin down a throat that gaped a hundred yards wide. He risked a last glance up – the sky was an arched roof resting upon leaning walls of water, and whether it was the sky that revolved, or the walls, it was beyond the eye to tell. He stared down again, head spinning with vertigo, and spied the skiff.

  ‘Nathaniel!’ he cried, knowing it was to no avail.

  The old man lay sprawled across the bow of his craft, face down, an arm hanging over the side. He appeared to be unconscious. The skiff was racing around an ever- narrowing circle, only a scant few feet above the final descent. Dow read the angles and saw that if at the last moment he turned with the maelstrom’s spin, then he could slip up beside the skiff, match its path for perhaps half an orbit, and then climb away again with the thrust of his sail. In that half rotation, he would have to drag Nathaniel bodily from one boat to the other.

  There was no time now even for fear. Dow was a predatory bird, swooping in to steal prey from the grip of some vaster but slower creature. Spray sheeted again as he wrenched the Maelstrom around to join the spin, and then came chasing along to the stern of the skiff. But now a suffocating weight bore down, so tight was Dow’s trajectory about the funnel. He sank slowly to his knees. The boat was pinned to the rotating wall and the world had become surreal, a barrel tilted on its side with a madly whirling sky at one end and a black abyss at the other.

  Inch by inch the Maelstrom crept up on Nathaniel’s craft. Agonisingly slow, the two boats drew level, a single foot of water between them. And agonisingly heavy, Dow’s hand stretched across to clutch the side of the skiff. He pulled, and the two boats were hull to hull. Nathaniel was in reach. Dow stretched again and felt his fingers brush the old man’s shirt. Nathaniel stirred at the touch. If only the old man would reach his own arm out—

  Then Dow lifted his eyes and saw beyond Nathaniel, and knew that none of it mattered anymore. They had crossed over the brink of the fatal horizon, and he was gazing straight down now into oblivion.

  They were inside the funnel.

  It did not seem to Dow, in the frozen moments that followed, that such a place could exist in the world he thought he knew. Where there should have been only whirling darkness there was, in fact, a vivid blue glow, shimmering and flickering as if unseen bolts of lightning were igniting in the deeps. And revealed by such illumination was an enormous gullet falling sheerly down into the ocean, a throat so full of noise that it was like a gale in Dow’s face, icy somehow and stinging his eyes. Down and down the hole dropped, so far that it seemed impossible that the sea could even be so deep so close to shore, and that the maelstrom must spin instead over some chasm in the seabed that opened into a bottomless netherworld.

  Except there was a bottom. Far down, where the throat narrowed at last and where the watery walls met and thrashed together, there was solid ground. It was an upthrust pinnacle of rock, drowned deep for most of its existence but undrowned now, hard and jagged, proof against all the water’s fury – the fulcrum indeed upon which the entire maelstrom turned.

  And there were things upon that rock.

  The frigid air might have been a lens of glass, so mercilessly did it magnify those things to Dow’s gaze – and, no doubt, to Nathaniel’s.

  There, amid the lank seaweed and the noisome blisters of shells and polyps, was jammed a boat – or at least, the shape of a boat, seemingly formed of stone. Indeed, it might have been a natural formation, not a craft at all . . . or it might have been a fishing boat, sucked down and dashed there some ten years before, and glazed since by layer after layer of nicre. And the question of which it was might never have been answerable, if not for the evidence of the smaller shapes that lay within. Two figures, grotesquely pale and whole and preserved by the salts.

  Dow stared at them, his horror creeping, even as the maelstrom roared about him and his own boat spun on the verge of annihilation. The first of the corpses lay before a stone pillar that had once been a mast. Its arms were clasped about the other corpse, and this second figure stood upright, the mast at its back. Ropes of seaweed had replaced the actual ropes that had once bound it there.

  So suggestive were the poses that even now the first figure might have been striving to free the second – the father struggling with the ropes that he himself had tied to preserve the life of his son, but which now lashed the boy to a boat that was lodged against the underwater mount, never to rise. And in their white rigid faces and in the black hollows of their screaming mouths could be read the hideousness of those last drowning moments.

  All this Dow saw in a heartbeat, gazing over Nathaniel’s shoulder, their two boats still side by side suspended at the top of the funnel. But it was an eternity too, and in that same eternity Dow saw Nathaniel turn his head, away from the sight of his family, away from the irrefutable fact of their death and from the cruelty of its manner. His gaze met Dow’s at last. And Dow could see that all the wild madness in Nathaniel had indeed been snuffed out, that in the old man’s eyes there was nothing now but desolation and grief, and a terrible knowing.

  Dow extended his hand again, straining against the oppressive weight of the spin, and Nathaniel managed to shift his own arm a fraction, his trembling fingers reaching achingly close to Dow’s . . .

  But then the skiff shifted across the wall of the funnel, its bow suddenly nosing down. Dow lunged – his fingers gr
azed Nathaniel’s he was sure – then their hands were a yard apart, and then two, the gap widening. It was too late. The skiff was falling away while the larger boat hung on the lip a moment longer. Dow was granted a last glimpse into Nathaniel’s eyes to see the awareness of his fate lighting there, and the despair and the terror.

  Then the old man was flung aside, and like a leaf the skiff was whirled away, down into the flickering chaos, irretrievably lost.

  Dow could not even wait long enough to witness Nathaniel’s final end, his own doom hung too close. His hands as heavy as iron, he grasped the rudder and heaved with all his will. For an incalculable length of time – one circuit of the funnel, or twenty, Dow would never know – nothing happened. He was poised perfectly on the brink and would remain there, it seemed, until some slight ripple broke the balance and sent him tumbling down in Nathaniel’s wake.

  In the end it was the maelstrom itself that saved him, and the howling breath that came from its throat – for that same breath filled the sail near to ripping it apart, and slowly, fraction by fraction, the Maelstrom began to right itself and climb away. The lip of the awful funnel receded, and Dow felt the blood flowing in his limbs again. He rose from his knees. Clear of the throat at last he saw that the wind of the everyday world, the northern gale, still blew. At length he was able, as before, to turn, and then begin the long climb to the outer rim.

  It was a harder ascent than the last. By the time the Maelstrom struggled free, Dow’s arms and legs were trembling in the extremities of exhaustion. But he was numb now to all pain or wonder or fear. All he felt was the emptiness of his failure and the finality of Nathaniel’s death. When he thought to look about himself, he saw that he was sailing on the open ocean again, far out beyond the Rip, and that the clouds were thinning and streaming away in the wind. Sunlight glistened on the wave-tops, and the water was blue and brilliantly clear.

  But even the sea held no appeal to him now. Dow brought the boat about and, as the day wore from morning into afternoon, tacked mindlessly back and forth across the Heads while the maelstrom raged and the Claw emptied itself of its flood waters. At some point the flow fell below that necessary to drive the great whirlpool, and its roar began to die. Eventually it frittered away to little more than a revolving circle of foam, huge but impotent. And yet it was hours more before the outflow ceased entirely, and the Rip was safe again to cross.

  It was evening thus, the sky cold and empty, the north wind fading, when Dow finally sailed his little craft back through the Heads. He came slowly, riding with the incoming tide. Around him the waters swirled in harmless spirals, tentative and laced with old foam – as exhausted perhaps as Dow himself, and equally uncertain as to where they should go. It was very quiet now all about the headlands, the thunder of the day only a memory. The channel and the Claw looked much as they always had, as if the whirlpool had never risen.

  But upon East Head, and upon the Stone Port seawall and the high bastions of the Ship Kings’ citadel, the thousands waited still, watching in silence as Dow and the Maelstrom came home from the sea.

  The following few days were the most aimless and empty that Dow had ever known. He was alive and unharmed, his heart beat as strongly as ever and the blood pumped warm in his veins. Overhead the sun shone bright in the blue sky, as if summer had returned, and all around him Stromner went swiftly about recovering from the flood, with a great bustle of hammering and sawing and rebuilding. Folk went to and fro, smiling in the sunshine. Everything, it seemed, glowed with new life, having emerged from the shadow of the maelstrom. And yet Dow felt only cold and numb, as hollow as an old shell upon a beach, and as brittle as a rotten tree trunk that was upright yet, but ready any moment to fall.

  He returned, on the evening of the whirlpool, to Nathaniel’s shack, even though he no longer had any claim to the house. People came clamouring to the door, Boiler and the other villagers, bringing drink and food, their faces eager, their mouths babbling with questions. But nothing they said reached Dow. He felt deafened; there was a roaring in his head, and all other sounds seemed to come from far off. Finally Boiler shepherded the visitors away, and Dow tried to sleep, but when he closed his eyes the world spun, slow and horrible, and so he sat upright in Nathaniel’s chair, awake in the darkness.

  At dawn he walked down to the beach. A vague notion had come to him that he should be fishing, now that the storm was over. When he arrived he saw that the other fishermen of Stromner were themselves getting back to work, and were busy with the morning’s launch. They called to him, but still the numbness in Dow was impenetrable, and he did not answer. He looked at the Maelstrom. It sat where he’d left it the night before. And he knew he could not go fishing. The Maelstrom was not his to use. He had no more claim to Nathaniel’s boat than he had to Nathaniel’s house. Not now that their true owner was no more . . .

  He turned away. All that day, and then the next, Dow drifted without purpose. At times he walked about the village, amid the drying mud and the noise of rebuilding, oblivious to the stares of those he passed by. At times he slept, in snatches of unconsciousness that left him no more rested than before. At times he picked at the food that his visitors of the first night had left behind. But mostly he simply sat in Nathaniel’s chair and stared at nothing. He knew it wasn’t right. He knew that there were surely things he should be doing. But somehow he couldn’t think of a one.

  On the third night, for lack of anything else, he went to the inn. As he approached he could hear shouts and laughter coming from the bar, and when he entered a crowd of faces turned to him, bright with drink and good cheer. But he paid no attention to the Stromner folk. He was apart from them. A space was cleared at a table, and Dow allowed himself to be led there. Boiler brought him a mug of beer, and Inga, her manner oddly shy, brought him a meal. Then they drew away. Dow ate, barely aware of the silence that had gathered around him, or that everyone was watching his every move.

  Then the whispering began. At first only a mutter here, or a hushed word there, but slowly it grew, until it was a soft rain that filled the bar. And strangely it was the very softness of the sound that finally breached the deafness in Dow. For the folk of Stromner were praising him. In reverent murmurs, one to another, they were extolling his feats against the whirlpool. Dow Amber, they said, the boy from the highlands, had triumphed where no mariner ever had. He had defeated the maelstrom and broken its power. For had they not seen him descend into its monstrous funnel, and yet had he not emerged from it alive?

  And at that, an emotion finally did stir in Dow – a dim, crawling horror. For they were wrong, as wrong as they could be. He had not defeated the maelstrom. No one could defeat the unthinking fury of that howling funnel. It knew nothing of any winning or losing, it knew only obliteration. And it had swallowed Nathaniel whole. Nathaniel was dead. He was dead.

  But no one mentioned Nathaniel. The old man might never have lived. The whispering gave way to louder con- versations, and then to shouts and laughter again, and calls for more beer. The evening had resumed its course. And now an anger mounted steadily in Dow. For he saw how things were.

  Stromner was happy. The fishermen were celebrating bountiful catches in the bay and bragging of the high prices they had set over in flood-ravaged Stone Port, where supplies were short. The women were chattering gaily about the repairs to their houses; it was a chance to make things better, to build new rooms, to lay new floors where old ones had rotted. And parents were wondering aloud if it might even be time to send for all those sons and daughters who had been packed off to other towns in the years previous, and bring them home.

  For everyone agreed on one thing; a change had come over Stromner. They’d all felt it the moment the whirlpool had died in the Rip; a lifting of the spirits, a lightening of the air. Whereas the first maelstrom had blighted the village fortunes, it seemed that this second maelstrom had done the opposite. Hope had returned. And it was Dow Amber who was to thank for it. He had dispatched the whirlpool’s curse, just
as he had been brought there to do.

  This was more than Dow could bear. The crowd’s approval washed over him like a hateful, beery breath; every respectful glance he was given grated, every burst of laughter set his teeth all the more on edge. It was bad enough that he had failed Nathaniel, but now to be admired for it by these fools . . .

  In his revulsion Dow looked suddenly to the corner where Mother Gale always sat, for it came to him that she must be behind it all, that she must be the one spreading tales of his purported victory, and convincing the Stromner folk that all their troubles had ended. It would be typical of the lies she told. For she did lie. He had discovered as much in the maelstrom.

  But the old woman was not in her corner.

  For no reason he could name, this alarmed Dow. Boiler was passing by with a tray of drinks. Dow rose and clutched the innkeeper’s arm urgently. ‘Where is she? Where’s Mother Gale?’

  ‘At home in her bed, I’m told. She’s ill.’

  But a woman nearby – it was Mary Strand – overheard, and laughed. ‘Ill? She’s not ill, not unless choking on her own words has made her so. She’s miserable, is all, because her prophecies of doom and woe have not come true. Foolish old witch. When times were bad she was the only one who was happy. Now that times look better, where is she? Taken to her bed to sulk. Ha!’

  An inexplicable rage arose in Dow at this; his hands clenched and in another instant he might have throttled the woman where she stood.

  Boiler intervened, quickly putting down his tray, and taking Dow aside. ‘Go home,’ he advised. ‘Company is not what you need right now. Go home and don’t come back any time soon. There’s nothing to worry about. I’ll send Inga of a night, with all the food and drink you could want.’