Grim Expectations

by KW Jeter

  That did not happen. Instead, I witnessed Spivvem hoisting the pole to a vertical position, then jabbing it straight down toward the gondola’s submerged wheels and the iron tracks on which they rolled. The boat’s progress before had been so steady and slow, as to scarcely raise a ripple in the surrounding water – no more; with a jolt that slid me back toward the perch on which Spivvem stood, the gondola leapt forward, and continued to accelerate.

  Whatever disarrangement had been caused to the mechanism beneath, it was more than sufficient to extract the gondola’s remaining occupants from our previous danger; from somewhere behind us, Blightley managed to fire another shot, but it went farther wide than the one before. Foolishly, I raised my head and caught a last glimpse of the two Americans bobbing in the gondola’s wake, the smaller still panting for breath and his red-faced partner shouting a curse at us, the exact obscenity swallowed in the echoing distance.

  As is so often the case, one hazard was evaded, only to be replaced with another. The damage that Spivvem had caused to the gondola’s propulsive mechanism did not lessen in its effects, but in fact increased, perhaps to a greater degree than even he had anticipated. As the boat sped faster, its motion became more erratic and violent, shaken by both the malfunctioning apparatus to which it was fastened and the impact of its prow against the water ahead. Flinging out my arms, I seized hold of the gondola’s sides to keep from being pitched out of it.

  Spivvem had no such recourse available; having engineered our escape, he fell victim to the means by which he had done so. I saw him toppling backward, dislodged from the perch on which he had been standing. With no time for thought, I reached to grasp one of his pinwheeling hands; I nearly succeed in securing him – my outstretched fingertips brushed against his, before he disappeared into the dark behind. If there was a splash as he struck the water, I could not hear it through the battering noises of the boat’s now rocket-like progress.

  The dangling lamp swung free of its hook, sailing in a comet arc before it too was extinguished. I could see nothing from where I had pinioned myself, but only sensed the gondola beginning to disintegrate about me. A black wave swamped over me, and I fought to fill my lungs through it, as I hurtled toward some unknowable destination, which I knew I would never reach.

  Part III

  A Seaside Idyll

  NINE

  An Acquaintance from the Past Is Met Again

  So often have I suffered under the misapprehension of my own death, and of having been translated to whatever world awaits us beyond the grave, that I am no longer amazed to open my eyes and find myself in circumstances unknown to me.

  At least there was daylight upon this scene; an immediate comfort, given that the most recent memory I could summon was of being engulfed in unlit waters, wracked by the velocity of my passage through them. Evidence of that terminated journey lay strewn about me; as I raised my head, blinking, I spotted fragments of gaily painted wood, one of which was of sufficient size to indicate the curved prow of the gondola in which I had ridden as captive of an uncertain fate. Other remnants were scattered about the sandy foreshore upon which I lay; as I raised myself upon my elbows, my sodden garb clinging coldly to my frame, I could see that my arrival here – wherever here was – had been accomplished with some violence. The iron tracks on which the gondola had ridden, with such velocity as to render me unconscious, came to an end closer to the lapping water’s edge; an upright wooden barrier had been driven in two by the impact that had thrown me several yards farther.

  Craggy rocks, festooned with tangled seaweed, mounted stepwise to demarcate the shore’s limit. If my senseless form had struck them, no doubt the result would have been fatal, or at least crippling; to have somehow avoided that fate was as much good fortune as I could have hoped for – that, and to have awoken before any tide had risen over this little cove, at a depth sufficient to have drowned me.

  “Better you had died, Dower–” In this lonely circumstance, my predilection for addressing myself returned, there being no one else to burden with my thoughts. “You have not escaped a sorry fate, but merely exchanged a bad one for a worse.”

  This musing was prompted by the grimness of the scenery surrounding me. The coastline of Cornwall is harsh enough, but my memories of it were almost tropical by nature, compared to the bleak strand on which I had now been abandoned. The sun might have been shining, and even uncloudedly so, but not with force enough to keep my skin from shivering. Yet – oddly – at the same time, a sense of something like comfort came over me. I was not as apprehensive about my lot as I had been on similar occasions, most recently when I had found myself in the gondola, still intact then, in that shoddy subterranean Venice that the Americans Blightley and Haze had constructed. The more that my disordered thoughts reassembled themselves inside my skull, the less concern I seemed to have over the situation; my inward tranquillity very much resembled this place, still and silent after the turbulent ocean had retreated to its ponderous depths. My spirits actually rose to a fractional degree, as I gazed about myself; that elevation was accompanied by my own marvelling at the lack of anxiety I possessed. Perhaps – or so I placidly thought – I had suffered some otherwise undetected injury during my rapid transition here, specifically a blow to the head, such that some cerebral organ had been dislodged, as persons suffering similar traumas are reported to lose any sense of fear.

  But as immediately as I entertained that notion, I dismissed it; some other cause was in play here. As luck would have it, the mere effort of speculation evoked the answer. Which was memory; I knew this locale; I had been here before. An impressive span of years separated the previous time from this moment, but I was now certain that the world’s mysterious workings, with its seemingly endless panoply of schemers and machines, had somehow contrived to deposit me on the island of Groughay, far from the nearest human habitation, in the Outer Hebrides north and west of the Scottish mainland.

  To be sure, this happenstance would present some problems for me; my recall of Groughay was that it was the very definition of the word desolate, possessing little in the way of shelter from the elements, and even less in the way of bodily sustenance, other than the scraggly gorse upon the rock-strewn hills, and a few ill-tempered sheep – unless, of course, the passage of years and the harsh climate had rendered those extinct. I cared not for their fate; I resolved to face these difficulties relating to my further survival as they pressed themselves upon me. For now, I was simply glad to be alive, however battered by the mode of transport that had brought me here, and in a place – if not exactly home – the contours of which were familiar enough that I did not have to speculate as to what fresh Hell I had been thrust into.

  “Then–” I spoke aloud once more. “If I am not dead – for if I were, I don’t imagine I would be so bruised and battered – then this, while not necessarily an improvement in my conditions, is at least not the worst I could imagine.”

  “You are not dead, Dower–”

  A deep, guttural voice intruded upon my meandering thoughts.

  “This, I can assure you.”

  Startled, I gazed wildly about myself, attempting to perceive the person who had spoken to me. I had thought myself blessedly alone; to discover otherwise was a shock.

  “Here,” said the unseen other. “You are close enough to touch me, if you wished.”

  The possibility was raised once more, that I had suffered some derangement, either in the tumultuous flight from the subterranean chambers beneath the cemetery in Highgate to this far-flung point, or in my sudden casting upon the shore on which I had found myself. I saw no one; I seemed to be addressed by a person invisible.

  My bewilderment was both lessened and increased by what happened next. The voice’s source was revealed: what I had taken to be one of the cove’s dark rocks, slick with the ocean water that has washed over it, bestirred itself. I saw that it was a figure human as myself, who had been sitting this whole time upon the sand, arms crossed upon his knees as h
e had silently observed the castaway before him.

  “A long time.” He reached out and laid his hand upon the side of my face. “Do you not know me?”

  That I had mistakenly assumed the person to be stone rather than flesh-and-blood was explained by the garb that enveloped his body. Tightly fitting to his torso and limbs, of a thin monochrome substance that extended glove-like over his hands, but encased his head as well, masking his face; the only indication of his features was the narrow slits through which his unblinking gaze encompassed me in.

  “I never knew your name–” For now I did recognize the human-like figure before me. “But I always thought of you as the Brown Leather Man.”

  “As you wish.” His voice was slightly gentled – or such was my fancy; perhaps the passage of time had rendered his memories of me less harsh, enough that he could greet me in a fashion friendlier than that by which he had last departed of me, so long ago. “It matters little.”

  Reader, indulge me this; if meeting again this singular creature cast me into a reflective mood, I issue no apology for that. For I had lost so much, of things both great and small, that for this one to be unexpectedly restored… as a bankruptee finds a lost penny in his pocket, and considers himself absurdly wealthy thereby, so my emotions ran. In the scales of the larger world, the loss of one’s wife is a minute thing, scarcely noticed by any save the widower – but I had lost a world as well, and the ticking, clanking one which had been substituted for it seemed a poor exchange. The Brown Leather Man was a dark shade from out my past – but still from mine and not another’s, and for that I found myself grateful.

  Of course, this occasion was not the first on which I thought he had re-appeared before me. In Cornwall – before Miss McThane became my wife, and I was but a defeated and suicidal bachelor – a person strode out of the ocean and confronted me, and I had mistaken him for this one. In the event, that intruder in my life had turned out to be a scoundrel named Stonebrake, clad at that time in a diving costume that enabled him to pursue his devious errands unobserved in the ocean depths; he had come dripping out upon the land to draw me into various schemes, all of which I came to regret. But no matter now; the man was dead – but this one, the actual Brown Leather Man, was seemingly alive, though I had believed I would never lay eyes upon him again.

  “You are surprised, Dower.” He accurately read my thoughts, as though they were visibly swirling behind my eyes. “Need you be?”

  “Apparently so,” I said. “You have ever surprised me.”

  No truer statement could have been uttered by me. The erratic course of my life, from one disaster to another, had been launched by this creature, other than human as he was; had he not turned up on the doorstep of my watch shop in Clerkenwell, so many years ago, I might have led a decently placid existence, as free of excitement as any proper Englishman might have wished. The world’s vast conspiracies would have passed over my head, like clouds that appear darkly massive from a distance, but dissolve to mere occluding mist when they lower themselves to earth. I could not hold him accountable as author of all the schemes and follies in which I became enmeshed; many had been required, including my own deceased father, to engineer all those interlinked machinations. But just as ships are racked by tumultuous seas, the events had been first augured by the appearance of this stormy petrel.

  “And you surprise me now.” I studied the glistening blank mask that served as the Brown Leather Man’s face, searching for some clue there. “I might not be dead – your word I take for that – but I confess that I believed you were; or as good as.”

  “Your kind thinks in such a way.” His gaze turned from me for a moment, gazing upon the grey, sullen waters. “Humanity, as you call yourselves – if other beings are not in communion with you, wisely keeping to themselves, then you believe they have no existence at all. So then, most that lives is a secret to you.”

  I was not prepared to debate the point; I knew from our previous acquaintance, that his was a soul given to deeply brooding concerns. Perhaps it was a characteristic of his species, if any survived other than himself; the Atlantic depths in which the selkies, as known to the Scots who on rare occasions encountered them, had made their sunless home would seem well-suited for producing such a race of gloomy philosophers.

  “Such might well be the case.” I looked out upon the ocean, the slowness of its lapping waves evoking a peaceful effect. “I suspect that I resemble my brethren in that regard – the less I know, the happier I am for it.”

  “The sentiment expressed does not surprise me.” The dark slits of the Brown Leather Man’s eyes regarded me again. “Your nature, when first we met, was one left untroubled by mere events. The world treats roughly such placid souls – much has happened recently, that would have thrown those of common temper into sheer panic.”

  “Age and fatigue have confirmed that petty wisdom I possessed when younger. No one seems to be firing a rifle toward me at this moment, so I might as well savour it. And…” I nodded slowly. “I have just now reached a more profound conclusion, which casts a great many things in a different light.”

  “And what is that?”

  “I find myself here on the island of Groughay.” My outflung gesture took in the surrounding lichen-embossed rocks, and whatever bleak terrain lay beyond them. “Circumstances brought me here once before; outlandish ones, to be certain. Why then should I believe that I ever left this place? My memories are of even wilder events that extracted me hence, and deposited me back in a veritable maelstrom of unfolded conspiracies and their seemingly insane agents; I remember a certain Lord Bendray, who had the absurd notion of exploding this world to flinders, so that he might communicate with those entities he believed to be in existence on other planets – but though he might have been the first of such I encountered, he was hardly the worst of them. Rather than considering Groughay as a place of exile, perhaps I should more properly regard it as one of refuge. Having escaped, however unwilling I might have been at the time, from a maddened world to this peaceful rock, perhaps all those subsequent lunacies were but constructed by my imagination, and never took place in reality at all.”

  “Indeed?” If the Brown Leather Man’s masked face had been able to display an expression, it would have been a quizzical one. “So you believe that you have somehow dreamt everything that happened to you, from your first arrival here onward?”

  “Actually, it would have had to have been my only arrival here, if I never left. But yes, everything – the contents of my memory are so jumbled up, and so chaotic in nature, that they do seem dream-like. Or nightmarish, rather, to use a more precise term.” I plunged my fingers into the damp sand beside me, and drew up a handful, sifting the grains as though to determine whether they were more real than all those now-vanished events. “Perhaps they were the labour of but a single night, my overwrought brain churning up one phantasmal vision after another as I slept, and this is my first waking morning upon the island.”

  “And what of those?” A dark finger pointed toward the splintered fragments of wood strewn nearby, the remnants of a brightly painted Venetian gondola. “Do dreams usually leave bits and pieces behind, that you can see and pick up?”

  “Hm.” I felt my own brow crease. “I will have to think about that. But in all honesty, that seems like a detail of little significance compared to the logic I have pursued.” My mood had been so upraised by the revelations that had struck me, I was not about to let another deflate them. “And indeed, why not chase the notion further? Perhaps the issue at hand is not whether, having once come to Groughay, I have ever left this place – but having dreamt of a chaos of wild events, I have ever woken up, or whether I continue to dream still.” I waved a dismissive hand toward the wooden shards. “Such things would require precious little imagination, compared to all the rest that has seemingly been produced by my night-fevered brain. You yourself seem impressively real, and so my conversation with you – but then, so did all those other, vaster articles and eve
nts.”

  “All of which,” observed the Brown Leather Man, “you have now convinced yourself to have been phantasms, mere wisps cavorting inside your skull as you slept, and continue to sleep. If so, then I might be such as well – would that not be the case?”

  “There is no call to be offended by it.” I lifted my shoulders in a shrug. “If offence you do take, it is no more than my dreaming that you do so.”

  “Allow me to inject a counter-argument to the discussion.” My sable companion rose to his feet, a few rivulets coursing off the tightly fitting garb that kept his body safely encased in the vivifying fluids of his native sea. He stepped closer to me, then leaned forward while swinging one arm in a swooping arc. His fist struck a blow to the side of my head, with sufficient velocity to knock me sprawling upon one shoulder. “There–” His narrowed gaze fell upon me. “Does that cause any reconsideration on your part, as to what is real and what is dream?”

  “Damn your hide–” Raising my own hand, I rubbed the injured spot, which continued to throb painfully. “I hope you realize that it is possible to voice a disagreement with someone, without necessarily resorting to violence.”

  “Do you concede my point?”

  “I fail to see where you have made any. A man can as easily dream of being struck, as any other event.”

  “If I have not yet convinced you of my reality–” The Brown Leather Man displayed his fist, still tightly clenched. “Then perhaps I need to repeat my assertion, with greater force.”