Far From The Sea We Know

by Frank Sheldon

She didn’t finish because now, as the Bluedrop slowly turned, she did see someone through the one visible port. It was her father, and he was slumped over, not moving. The interior seemed to full of smoke.

  “Please, not a fire,” Chiffrey said. “Emory’s having trouble getting the hatch open. Damn it!”

  Her heart pounded, and her voice cracked in a way she never let it. “Why isn’t anyone trying from the inside?”

  A swell lifted the sub and her father’s head flopped back and forth, all life gone.

  “Dad! Dad! God, no. Matthew! Get it open! Get them out of there! Shit!”

  Penny ran to the port side, grabbed hold of a line and half swung, half jumped over onto the hull of the Bluedrop, landing on all fours like a cat. A diver, crouching on the hull, looked at her in bafflement, then up at the deck as if waiting instructions. Before anyone could say anything, she slipped past him and alongside Emory, who still wrestled with the hatch opening.

  “Pressure must have warped the seals,” he said. He seemed not at all surprised at Penny’s appearance.

  She placed her hands next to his on the wheel he was trying to turn. Tilting her head forward, she took in a breath and let it explode with a cry. “Now! Eiiiiyahhhhh!”

  She focused the strength of her whole body in her hands, and the hatch came loose with a hermetic hiss. She sank back, panting.

  “Open it. Please…” she implored.

  Emory turned the last lug, even while staring at her in amazement. The hatch opened, but it wasn’t smoke that billowed out. Violets. It smelled like violets.

  “They’re going to lift…hey, wait!” Emory said too late as Penny dove like a rabbit into the open hatch.

  “Take her up now!” she heard him say. After the bright sunlight, she couldn’t see much at first in the unlit sub with the flowery mist still swirling around, but she knew where her father had been sitting. She groped around and put her ear down on his chest, listening for a heartbeat. It was loud and clear, and he was beginning to stir.

  A deep sigh whooshed out of her, and with it, the surge of energy that had propelled her since her leap from the ship. She collapsed like a discarded marionette. Her vision went black for a moment, then slowly cleared. Already she could see better as much of the flowery mist had escaped.

  They were all right!

  The crane started to lift them out of the water and enough daylight streamed through the windows to illuminate the interior.

  Penny held her father’s head, making sure he could breathe. She heard movement behind her. It was Matthew coming to. Without looking back, she said to him, “Satisfied? I hope it was worth it, because it looks like the Bluedrop is fried.” The minisub slid into its cradle on the deck with a dull thunk.

  “Matthew?”

  Her father opened his eyes. Becka was now conscious, her hands coming up to her face. Someone appeared with a stethoscope and held it to her father’s chest.

  “Penelope,” her father whispered. “What’s happened?”

  “Dad…”

  “How are they?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Matthew.”

  “Where did you take him? Is he all right?”

  She held Matthew’s hat and kneaded it with both her hands as she spoke. “He’s not here. Only his clothes.”

  “Gone?” her father asked, but the look on his face reflected her own and made it clear that no answer would be necessary.

  CHAPTER 48

  My name is Matthew, my name is…

  A familiar presence. Always here. Forgotten…

  Softly encircled, I cannot move, I must…

  Whose life?

  My name…is…

  I…must?

  All around me, flowing through me, I close my eyes, but no darkness waits…and then, it is all here, every piece and particle unbound by space or plan, wordless and awful in its coiled infinity and, in my terror, beautiful beyond bearing.

  Something opens…

  I am…everyone…everything…everywhere…always…

  CHAPTER 49

  Someone knocked on Penny’s door, but she said, “Go away.” Not long after that, she put the cap back on the bottle of scotch. It wasn’t taking her where she wanted to go.

  Just making it worse….

  The last glimmer of twilight was coming in through the porthole as she crawled under the covers of her bunk.

  Shut the curtains. Don’t try to sleep, just…

  But she did, and deeply. Her alarm went off in her darkened sanctuary a few hours later and she immediately got up and pulled on her shoes.

  Yesterday afternoon, the day Matthew disappeared, she thought Andrew might suggest she not take the early morning watch, but he didn’t. And of course, he wouldn’t. Idleness was not what she needed right now. And besides that, four in the morning had always been good to her.

  She arrived at the bridge and took her place behind the wheel with barely a nod to the student crewmember she replaced. At least he made no attempt to cheer her up. She didn’t want to be cheered up.

  She quickly scanned the horizon and surveyed the instruments. Checked the watch log. All seemed as it should be until her gaze fell on Valentina’s necklace. Suspended above the center port window like a talisman, it barely moved in a becalmed sea that in every direction was like an endless black shroud.

  I’m not going to lose him, not another one. The dream, what was it, what…

  She kept the speed down to conserve fuel. Just enough to keep the generators going and to make a little headway. For the last day, they had just been crisscrossing the circle, being careful to never to go outside its periphery. Even when they got close, however, they could still not detect the small anomalies she had originally discovered that demarcated the circle's edge. The bottom showed up clear enough on sonar, but the dome, whether hidden again or simply gone, was nowhere to be seen.

  Behind her, the transceiver was continuing to spread out and, in the process, was steadily dissolving into the decking. Though its “roots” seemed to have reached the Valentina’s instrumentation, no one had suggested they try to do anything about it. Even if someone had, it would not be like some barnacle you could just scrape off. She could just barely make it out as it was, and she had a feeling it would soon disappear completely.

  Four hours later, Penny had done little except stare at the horizon and occasionally the old brass compass in the binnacle. A large mug of strong coffee, delivered by Mateo, had been her only company. The day was now bright, and every wave and ripple shot back at her like a million tiny suns. No one else dropped by, and those now on deck didn’t glance up. They seemed to make a point of not glancing up. She couldn’t really blame them. Since Matthew’s disappearance, everything she had done and the few words she had spoken had conveyed that she wanted nothing except to be left alone.

  Emory arrived to relieve her. He looked like he might speak, but didn’t. Before he had a chance to change his mind, she walked past him and went back to the cabin where she found a note stuck on the door. She snatched it off without reading, then walked into the cabin and shut the door tight.

  The dream, so familiar…

  She stood there for a while, not moving, then bent down to haul a bag out from under her bunk. After fishing out a couple of pair of jeans and too many socks, she slowly withdrew a package wrapped in cloth. She stared at it as if trying to divine its contents, then stood up and, without further hesitation, made her way up to the aft deck with it under her arm. The sun was piercingly bright, so she walked around to the shady side and found a place at the rail, where she read the note that had been stuck on her door, crumpled it up, and let it fall from her hand into the sea. A gull swooped down and snatched it briefly before dropping it without further interest.

  Matthew’s green baseball cap, the one he had worn during his decent in the Bluedrop, rested still unfamiliar on her head. A ring of his old sweat darkened the faded cotton just above the brim. Sh
e had seen him throw his other one away during their first day on the Valentina. The memory of his first confrontation with Ripler and the hat sailing off in the breeze almost made her smile.

  The weather would stay calm and sunny today judging by the few clouds. A variety of seabirds were still around, and someone had just tossed a sample net over the side to find out what they were eating. Not much else was happening, but there would be no talk of leaving the area, at least for now. Andrew had put her mind at ease on that point at least by making it clear yesterday the Valentina would stay in the area with no plan to leave.

  She put the package down for a moment, wiped the salt from the sunglasses that Becka had recently given her with the hem of her shirt, and put them back on. There wasn’t anything on the horizon to keep her focus from wandering in and out. They were headed in the same direction as the wind, so the air was oddly still. It felt like being nowhere. She sighed and looked back toward the stern. Their wake radiated out endlessly, mirrored twins sundered by the knife of time and circumstance, the Valentina their only connecting point.

  “He’s not lost.”

  The voice came from behind her, but there was no need to look back.

  The Captain of the Valentina didn’t say anything more but, as usual when Andrew did that, it got her to talking.

  “Why did he insist on going?” she said while continuing to stare out across the swells. The ship had just turned and the breeze was now coming across the deck, so she instinctively walked toward a windbreak.

  Andrew followed her around a bulkhead and finally spoke. “And what would you have done?”

  “I would have waited to see what else we could have come up with, not go blundering down there because we caved into pressure from people who aren’t here. We just dangled ourselves in front of it to see what would bite—what kind of strategy was that?”

  “Putting it like that, a short term one.”

  “No one listened to me.”

  “Your father, you mean.”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Go talk with him,” he said.

  “With him or at him? When has he ever listened when it really mattered? He was dying to go down, and you know it. He can’t bear the thought of retiring. Yes, I know: ‘There are repercussions if we act, but there are repercussions if we do nothing. I chose to act.’ That’s the one they’ll put on his memorial plaque for a new wing at the Point after he’s safely dead and out of their hair.”

  Andrew didn’t react, but after a pause said, “Your reasons for their not going down were more like worries. Didn’t seem like you.”

  “So, my worries were not good enough, and now Matthew is gone.”

  Andrew stood and waited with the patience of a stone. “Before my watch, I got a little sleep,” Penny said. She cradled the package she had retrieved from her bag against her chest like a schoolgirl would her books.

  “I saw him in a dream last night.” She gave Andrew a sideways glance.

  “Let’s hear it,” was his only reply.

  “You sure? I find listening to other people’s dreams excruciatingly boring.”

  “I get a message, I listen.”

  “I didn’t say it was a message.”

  “In some way, everything is.”

  She laughed and looked at him another moment. Then she began to gaze inward, eyes half closed. “I’ve had no memory of any dreams for ages. That’s how I like it. Sleep like the dead. Good practice for the future. Nothing, absolutely nothing. I never understood the attraction of an afterlife. Isn’t one enough?”

  He wouldn’t say much more until she was done, so she went on. “I went to a Jungian analyst for almost three years. It seems a long time ago now. We always talked about my dreams, which were vivid back then. I’d write them down, sometimes in the morning, sometimes at night when I woke. It helped me at a time when I needed help, and I hate needing help, as you know. Then I stopped dreaming. Completely. I figured I was ‘cured.’ The analyst was not happy. I think she felt I was holding something back, and the way it all ended led me to at least a partial loss of confidence in the whole business.”

  She slid the cloth off the package. It was a scrapbook. While gathering her gear for the trip to the Valentina, she had come across it in the closet of her old room at home. For some reason, she had brought it along, perhaps just to have a bit of something familiar with her while at sea. The covers were made of animal skins, road kills mostly, that she had tanned and sewn together over cardboard when she was fourteen. She hadn’t looked at it for years. Inside, she had glued things like leaves and feathers. Two facing pages had been needed for the cast-off skin of a rattlesnake she had found on a field trip east of the Cascades. Other pages held her first field notes illustrated by sketches, all meticulously done from nature. She turned a few pages until she came to a sheet that had been folded in half to fit, then sealed closed with wax. She carefully broke the seal and half-opened the sheet as if not wanting something to escape as she peered inside. Her eyes teared up before she looked away and closed the book. After a moment, she continued speaking to Andrew.

  “The dream I had last night was by far the most vivid I have ever had. I’m not even sure it was a dream. It seemed so real. More than real. Makes whatever we’re in now seem like a dream in comparison.”

  “A vision?”

  “After what I have been saying lately about other people here, this seems strange. Sure, me, the big skeptic. But I have more than the dream. I have proof.” She gently hefted the scrapbook a few times as if judging its weight.

  “Proof isn’t always as strong as faith.”

  “I’ll think about that one later, but proof is important to me. It tells me I’m not just deluding myself. Listen to the whole thing, then tell me if you think I’m full of it.”

  She took a deep breath, let it all out, and half-closed her eyes again. “Trying to get back into the dream. I have this way.” She continued breathing, but her breathing got slower, deeper. She began to speak, not thinking or caring what she said.

  I’m somewhere on a beach. Behind is a fence on the border of a forest. Hills, green and misty, go off in the distance and far behind them are mountains, massive and sharp with snow. The peaks are in brilliant sunlight and seem to glow from within, but everything is dead quiet, totally still. It is beautiful, but something is absent, painfully absent…

  A ship is coming from the sea. Pirates are on the decks and in the rigging, the classic kind with bandannas, striped jerseys, and cutlasses. The ship drifts, almost seems to float in the air above the water, toward the beach. Its purpose is evident, yet I don’t know what it is. Like an apparition, the ship approaches, and the people on the beach are so fascinated they appear hypnotized.

  A shark gets mixed up in this somehow, and is transformed in a horrible way so it can move on land. It is coming toward the beach with the ship. I am completely terrified and try to erect a barrier to protect us from the shark creature. I am working fast, but it is too late.

  I look out and see a man standing on the deck. He’s the only one not dressed like a pirate. As the ship approaches, it changes, keeps changing until it becomes achingly beautiful. The people on the beach are transfixed. The man walks up front and puts a foot on the bowsprit, and he and the ship are riding over the rolling shore waves in a kind of dance.

  The shark is suddenly gone, or rather transformed. What takes its place is indescribably beautiful, yet awful to behold. It’s like something so long forgotten, that it’s been replaced by a nameless fear. Now it is finally remembered again as what it always was: a precious gift.

  The man is there still, and he dives into the creature as if into a pool and disappears. My fear leaves me. I can hear a kind of music, can almost remember something long lost, the most important thing, the one thing. I reach after it, but everything stops and there is nothing but the need to grasp after it. Over an eternity, it slowly slips away.

  I’m on the beach, and the people there, hundreds, tho
usands, are all around me. I seem to know them all, even closer than family. Like they are me. It all becomes an endless celebration and the man from the ship, smiling at me like a little baby in the sun, is walking toward me….

  A long quiet minute went by. She wiped her eyes with Matthew’s cap, glad for the sunglasses. “I didn’t really remember it all until now,” she said. “The man on the ship and the beach? It was Matthew. I could see him as clearly as I see you.”

  Andrew shifted his weight and leaned back on the railing. “Other people on this ship have had visions. You dismissed them.”

  “I know, and I’d probably be the first to blow this off if anyone else came up with it, but the whole thing seemed so real, so full of presence. But there’s more. When I awoke, I didn’t remember the dream at first. Later, when I did, I knew I’d had this feeling before, and even though it was just as intense as it was last night, I had somehow forgotten it completely. The dream I had last night was the same dream I had once when I was a girl. Exactly the same.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Andrew, I’m sure. Matthew was in my dream fifteen years ago!”

  “We all tend to remake things in our minds to agree with the way everything seems to us now. You told me that once.”

  She held the scrapbook, still closed, in both hands. “Not long after I made this, I drew a picture of the man from the dream and stuck it inside. Never showed it to anyone. Forgot all about the scrapbook until just before this trip, when it surfaced while I was looking for travel gear. For some reason I brought it with me, maybe with some vague idea of going through it, but I hadn’t really looked at that drawing in all that time until today.”