by Cameron Jace
John simply sailed, on an on, killing more whales, killing those who opposed them, standing on the edge of his ship, smoking his pipe, and staring at the sea.
In between, he sent his men to Neverland, to lull Peter Pan on board, but a series of complex events made the endeavor impossible — the Devil’s spell wasn’t enough to find the island; John ended up finding it many years later when Peter Pan, and his son, were thirteen years of age.
Instead, Long John Silver revolted against his mentor, a pirate by the name of Captain Flint. John raided his master’s ship and killed everyone on it, so only he and his crew would find Treasure Island one day.
Only one thing survived that raid. Captain Flint’s parrot.
Though John disdained the parrot, for it would repeat his words and gibber out nonsensical ones, he realized he may want to keep it, and ended up feeding it and befriending it.
“What’s your name, annoying bastard?” John asked the parrot that he had locked in a cage aboard the ship.
“Will you set me free, if I tell you?” the parrot quaked.
“I might,” John said. “I might even send you on a mission.”
“What will I gain from such a mission?”
“Protection.” John was carving the table with a sharp knife.
“From who?” the parrot countered.
“From me.” John licked the knife with the tip of his tongue. “You see, I kill almost anyone who annoys me, and no one ever stops me. So by obeying me unconditionally, I reward you with never hurting you,” he laughed. “I made that deal with my wife.”
The parrot stubbornly folded it wings (not a small feat for a parrot) and looked away. It was a proud parrot, a little devious from being raised by Captain Flint. “They call me Pickwick.”
“Pickwick the Parrot,” John mused. “I like it.”
“So what is my mission?”
“I will send you to the island where my wife and daughter live.” John stabbed the knife into the table. “I want you to spy on my wife and come tell me what you hear.”
“About what?”
“About who the real father of my son is.”
It’d be useful to note that Pickwick had later been found by Charmwill Glimmer, who managed to turn the cocky parrot into a good one.
As for John, he spent the next few months admiring the story about the Piper’s flute and the song that controlled the world. It’s my assumption that John directly worked for the Pied Piper, though some diaries contradict the idea. John had always mentioned being contacted by the Piper, but without evident proof to support the declaration.
It’s still hard to confirm that, but they were definitely on the same side of evil.
Pickwick returned and confirmed the boy wasn’t John’s.
“Did you hear her say it?”
“In her prayers,” Pickwick nodded.
“Just that? She didn’t talk to anyone about it?”
“She is almost imprisoned in the middle of the snow,” Pickwick said. “Only a few times she crossed over to the market for groceries and salt in her sleigh pulled by an old reindeer. There is none she can talk to.”
“But God,” John thought out loud. “What did she say?”
“That she regrets betraying you as a wife, but she had to save her daughter and herself from you wrath.”
“So she bedded another man?”
“She never spoke of this part, neither did she mention his name. She only mentioned he was from the Kingdom of Sorrow, which is not far away from the island.”
Silence fell on John for some time while Pickwick cleaned his feathers. John knew what Pickwick had been thinking. He’d been contemplating if John was going to kill his wife – still.
John didn’t utter a word. He only smirked and ordered the men to set sail back to the island where his family lived.
For days, John tortured his wife and made his daughter watch. I’ll exempt myself from being graphic here, but you get the idea.
John didn’t want to kill her. Just pain her deeply and physically because he wanted to know the name of the father. His wife would not give in for some reason. John threatened to hurt the girl, but that one had grown coy and sly now. She hid under the bed, in the basement, and sometimes buried herself in the snow so he could not find her.
With all his wrath and power, his little daughter outsmarted the pirate. She’d even managed to bring food to her mother behind his back.
“How does she do it?” John roared at his wife, strapped in shackles in the kitchen.
“She’s lived all of her childhood in the snow,” his wife challenged him. “You see that fast and wide blinding white outside. She sees it differently. She sees hedges, curves, and roads that no man has ever footed. She can tolerate the cold and feed herself out there. You will never catch her.”
“Then I will hurt the boy if you don’t speak.”
“I dare you. Hurt him and tell your men what? That you discovered he wasn’t your son and killed him? You’d die before admitting this to them!” She laughed in his face.
“You little witch!” John fisted his hand and bit himself, drawing blood that dripped onto the floor.
“You will never know, and you will live in pain forever.”
“Not if I kill you and rid myself of you,” he dared her and picked up the knife.
But something happened then. Someone called John from outside the house. John turned and went to open the door. Who would know of this place in the middle of the snow?
It’s hard for me to tell you who was outside and what happened between him and John, for it has never been documented in any of the diaries I’ve come across. How so, when John never wrote a diary and the man he met still remains a mystery? Neither had his daughter heard the conversation out there in the snow.
But you might guess what they talked about when you reach the end of this diary — that’s if you’ll can still breathe regularly by then.
When John got back in the house, his wife could see that something had happened to him. She could not say whether it was his demeanor or eyes. He seemed like someone else. Someone… peaceful.
She watched him unshackle her gently, apologizing for what he was and how he treated her. He washed her hands and her feet then went to cook for her.
He then summoned his daughter, kissed her forehead and invited her to the table. His son, too.
They held hands and prayed and ate.
Unbelievable as it may have been, John had metamorphosed into a good father for the next six months. He’d even ditched his sails.
It took the mother a few months to trust him. She was baffled, but the man would not hurt anyone. He’d read for the children and played with them in the snow. He’d even made a snowman with his daughter and son in the name of his love to them. They stuck six carrots in one side of the snow man and five in the other. One side was his daughter’s age. The other his son’s.
They agreed on sticking a new carrot for each year that passed.
“John,” the mother asked John one night, sleeping peacefully side by side in the same bed. “What happened that day with the man outside?”
“You mean the man who summoned me when I was about to…”
“To kill me, yes.” She liked to remind him of things like these, so she’d read better into him, still partially not trusting him. “Who was he?”
“A good man,” John nodded. “He showed me the way to the light.”
“Are you saying he was some kind of a phantom, that God sent him to you?”
“You can say so.”
“But you’re not planning on ever telling me who he is?”
“I will. One day. When the time is right.”
“I have to be honest with you, John,” she said. “It’s hard to believe you’ve changed after a ten minute conversation with that man.”
“I know,” John touched her face gently. “I understand. I’m a terrible man. Was, a terrible man. To be honest, part of my wickedness still stays with me.
I’m praying it would fade with each day I spend happily with you and the children.”
For a moment, she rubbed his hand onto her cheek and closed her eyes. But her inner instinct told her to push it off again.
“What’s wrong?” John asked.
“Are you expecting me to believe you’re willing to live with a son that’s not yours?”
“I’m treating him like my son, aren’t I?”
“You do, and it drives me mad,” she said. “You’ve even stopped asking who the father is.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“How so? It doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesn’t matter because whatever sin you’ve committed, you did because of me. I pushed you into it. You feared me and wanted to save your daughter’s life.”
She wondered why he said 'your daughter' not 'our daughter' but she didn’t comment. “And?”
“I have to accept the consequences of my wickedness, and so I will try to compensate you and the kids and love you until all of you forgive me.”
She was speechless. He had been like that for months. Every angle she investigated of him always proved he’d changed for the better. She’d even secretly followed him when he smoked his pipe alone on the top of snowy hill so as not to harm the children by the smoke. Even then, he seemed to have changed into a good man. She’d even see him wash the reindeer and mend its wound and feed it every day. Then when he was back, he’d sit by the fire and pray.
It was all true, but also unfathomable.
“Could I ask you one thing?” John said, breaking the silence.
“Of course.”
“I want you to promise me something.”
“If I can.”
John took her face in his hands and gently stared in her eyes. Even then she could not see wickedness in those eyes. It was as if this wasn’t John anymore, but the man who’d knocked on the door, now in John’s body.
“I want you to promise me that when I die you will forgive me for each day I sinned before I changed.”
She was speechless.
“Of course I will,” she said. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Just do it. If not for me, then for the children. Let them remember me as the good father, not the bad.”
That was the night when she started to warm up to him. Was something going to happen to John, something that would make him change, or something that would soon take her away from him?
It’s hard to exactly chronicle all the incidents to this story, since I’ve collected them from various diaries. All I know is that at some point there was no doubt about Long John Silver’s change. All until he sailed away again.
“I need to bring food to the table,” he told his wife. “A year’s sail will do that.”
“Who are you sailing with?” the wife said skeptically. “The pirates again?”
“I promise I won’t. I will sail on a good man’s boat, catch the fish, and sell it on the shore like any decent man.”
The wife could still read nothing but sincerity in his eyes. She let him kiss her on the forehead and watching him limp away in the snow, toward the nearest shore.
“John.” She couldn’t help it.
He turned around slowly. “Yes, darling.”
“I’m going to miss you.”
John smiled. “You’ve never said that to me before.”
“That’s because that other man was never the real you. I love you.”
But John did not keep his promise. He sailed with his brash and cruel pirates again. In fact, once he set foot on the boat, none of his recent demeanor stayed with him. He was Captain Ahab again, a ruthless pirate, womanizer, drinker, and whale hunter.
The months went by and the ship made a lot of money. The search for Peter Pan’s island was still on — and the whale of course. John met a lot of people on the way, including the Queen of Sorrow, whom he treated surprisingly well due to a prophecy he had to fulfill. It’s said that this act, too, was influenced by the Pied Piper, who secretly contacted him every once in a while.
While the Queen of Sorrow, still a young girl in love with Angel Von Sorrow, was on his boat, John kept to himself most of the time, pretending to be hiding in his room. He wasn’t. He spent his time eavesdropping on Carmilla’s story. Part of it was fulfilling the Piper’s prophecy; part of it was wondering if he could know of the identity of the man who’d bedded his wife and gave him an illegitimate son.
He found out, though.
After the queen left his boat in a climax of events, John was thought dead. He survived. Again, I’m not interested in this side of the story now. All you need to know is that he led another ship soon after, and continued his sailing through the Seven Seas.
Not only did he survive, but so did Pickwick, the magical Parrot.
“Go back to the island and spy on my wife,” demanded John.
“Again?”
“Just do as I say or I’ll rip your feathers out, one by one.”
“What do you want me to overhear this time?”
“Anything. Everything. Tell me how she is doing without me.”
“Oooh,” Pickwick wheezed. “You aren’t really in love with her? All this is an act about becoming a good family man.”
“Who said it’s an act?” John smoked his pipe.
“What else could it be? I mean you’re still the most vicious pirate I’ve ever known.”
“That’s because I need to bring food to the table,” John said absently, staring outside the window. “I am a new man back home, but out here in the world I know nothing but the job I do.”
“You could have at least tried.”
“Tried and did what?”
“You could have tried becoming a barber,” Pickwick suggested. “A cook, maybe, since you cook very well. Why haven’t you tried to get a job as a decent cook and feed your family?”
“None of the other pirates will let me,” John argued. “You know what kind of enemies I have all over the world. I’d take a noble job at some place and some two-cent pirate would spot me a week later. They wouldn’t leave me alone.”
“You could change the way you look.”
“How much of disguise can a one-legged man have, Pickwick?” John shot him an accusatory look.
Pickwick shrugged. It sounded like a hiccup. Then he itched his head. “I see.”
“I’m a doomed man. My past is hunting me. Now go find out if my wife still loves me and my kids. Find out if she believes me.”
Pickwick nodded and fluttered away.
In that time, John continued his sailing. Raiding a ship that transported books, of all things. John was furious. The raid was a failure. They hardly owned food or gold, and best use of books he could think of was burn them for warmth on the colder nights.
“What is this?” he asked his men. “Why would people have all of these books?”
“They read them,” one sailor said.
John chopped off his head immediately. “Why would a person waste his time on reading a book, let alone all these books?” He rubbed his chin.
None of the other sailors offered an answer, of course.
“Is reading books profitable in any way?” he asked. “Answer me, damn it!”
One sailor stepped up and reluctantly said, “None that we know of, Captain. Unless you consider knowledge profitable.”
“Knowledge?” John grimaced. “You can know things from reading about them?”
“It appears so.”
John stooped and picked up a book. He stared at the title. “One Thousand and One Nights?”
“It’s an Arabian collection of fairy tales,” the sailor said.
“What could fairy tales teach me?”
“It’s a different kind of book. It’s fiction.”
“Fic-what?”
“A story. A made up one.”
“You mean a lie?” John grinned.
“Lies that people love to read about. Well, sometimes they even think they’re true.�
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“Those readers are delusional, then? All who’d embarked this ship, too. Why would people want to be delusional?”
“It passes the time, Captain.”
“I’d prefer passing the time smoking or hunting something.”
“Not everyone is like you, but may I suggest something?”
“Make it countable, or I spill your blood.”
“Why not give the book a try. I know you can read. This is an English translation.”
“Why would I want to waste my time on an illusion?”
“I heard it’s very satisfactory. It’s like building castles in the sky. It’s magical. And addictive. It should bring you a lot of pleasure.”
“Pleasure as good as smoking my pipe?”
“I heard it’s even more. Books can even be your best friend.”
In no way did John understand any of this, but eventually he decided to give it a try. And what a try it was.
Soon, John could not stop reading, spending nights in his room, tossing and turning unable to sleep before finishing the next story. One part had attracted him best. The story of the smart Scheherazade, who postponed King Shahryar’s wrath by telling him a story each night. King Shahryar was known for killing his wives the day after bedding them — the kind of king Long John Silver admired — but then came Scheherazade and her masterful storytelling, enticing him with a new tale each night, ending it with the cliffhanger.
King Shahryar could not kill her, or he would not have learned of the rest of the story. This continued for several months, until Shahryar had fallen in love with her. And though she’d finished her stories, he could not bring himself to kill her, as he’d grown attached to her. He’d basically fallen in love with the storyteller. And it was time that made it harder for him to rid himself of her.
John closed the book with a wide grin on his face. The word ‘time’ was the key. If you’re attached to someone over time it’s harder and harder to lose them.
What a beautiful story he’d thought.
Then a knock came on his door.
“What is it?” John said.
“We’re sailing back home.”
“Why?”
“It’s been a year. The men need to go home to their families and then start another sail later.”
