But to my narrative I must return. I am postponing the moment. I must screw my courage to the sticking-place and continue on.
I now delve into the most sinister memory which is mine, one I have striven not to recollect yet still attends me in unguarded hours and hounds me during the long, dark watches of the night, ever unbidden.
Slate-grey clouds were amassing on the southern horizon as the little rowing boat plied its course across the water, entering the lonely bay. The mariner worked the oars, sullen and uncommunicative. Perdita was perched in my lap, restless and fretful. She seemed to sense that was all was not well and would not end well. I shushed and soothed her as best I could, but she would not be mollified.
Although a storm was looming, the air was still and the bay eerily quiet. The plash of the oar blades echoed sibilantly. No thunder yet sounded. No gull or mew uttered a cry. The atmosphere was, not inappropriately, funereal. I fancied that this might be how it was to cross the River Styx to Hades, the sombre sailor my Charon.
“This is an accursed place,” said he, casting an anxious eye about our surroundings. “I like it not. I would prefer an isle full of noises, sounds and sweet airs to this hushed, barren emptiness. It weighs upon my soul like a dead hand.”
He rowed on, but grew yet unhappier as we passed through the lilting shallows towards a strip of steep pebbled beach. By the time the boat’s keel dug into shingle he was muttering to himself, offering half-formed prayers to the gods. Is there anyone more superstitious than a seaman? And yet I could myself not help but feel a twinge of unease. All around us rose granite cliffs, Cyclopean and forbidding. Our ship, visible between the tips of the bay’s promontories, seemed impossibly far-off, as though it were retreating from perception, vanishing to some other realm. The distance could not have been more than a quarter-mile but the vessel might as well have been on the other side of the world for all that we could have reached it. That was how it felt, as though we were enacting our business on an altogether different globe.
“Make it quick,” the mariner said as I debarked onto dry land. “This storm will not wait. Nor may I.”
“I go, I go,” I replied impatiently, “look how I go, swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s bow.”
Besides Perdita I carried a scroll stating her name and a fardel I had prepared for her, a bundle of gold and other trinkets of value. I still harboured the hope that she might be discovered by some passing stranger and taken in, and I wished to offer that person an incentive for performing this benevolent deed.
As I forged up the slope of the beach looking for an overhang or a sheltered cleft wherein to set Perdita and her attendant offerings, the coming storm gave its first warning growl. A flash of lightning played, casting weird dancing shadows, and the thunder rumbled after. A wind was gathering. We had but minutes, thought I, before the storm commenced in earnest and surmounted us.
To my surprise and delight, I spied a pathway that wound into the cliffs. There were crude stairs, hewn from the rock. The bay, then, was not unfrequented. There was every chance that someone might happen by and discover Perdita.
One might argue that this was absurdly optimistic of me. I cannot convey how lonely and ill-omened that place was. It seemed as far from civilisation as the surface of the moon. Yet, having divined a flimsy straw of consolation, I clutched at it and clasped it tight to my bosom, even as, with much hesitation, I lay Perdita down at the foot of the stone steps.
She cried out as I relinquished her. It was a sound to shatter the stoutest of hearts. Her gasping sobs grew in volume and frequency as I turned away from her. This was the most difficult thing I had ever had to do. Tears blurred my vision. I had accomplished my labour and it felt as though I had lost a love. I stumbled down the beach, away from her whose short life I had almost certainly doomed, and it was only as I reached the waterline that I perceived that the boat was gone.
The mariner had not tarried but one moment. No sooner was my back turned than he brought his little barque around and began rowing strenuously out to sea. He was already four hundred yards hence and moving apace. I called to him, demanding that he come back, but peals of thunder overmatched my voice. I waved and gesticulated. He, with his back to the stern and his face to the bows, could clearly see me but affected not to. He just lowered his head and heaved all the more strenuously at the oars.
It can only have been dread that compelled him to flee, without reck for his passenger. Fear got the better of his nature and he abandoned me with less circumspection than I had abandoned poor Perdita. He could bear to spend not one second longer in that bay, and never mind that that meant marooning me.
I gave up remonstrating with him from afar. It availed me naught. The storm was now on top of us, pelting us with rain. The wind howled, lashing the waves to a seethe. I hurried back to where I had deposited Perdita, so as to be in the lee of the cleft and out of the tempest’s teeth. My last glimpse of the mariner showed me him toiling through an increasing swell, the boat bobbing and rocking with such violence that with every oar stroke in three he pulled at thin air. I cannot say whether or not he made it back to the ship. A vindictive part of me wishes he did not, but if he did, what fabrication did he tell his captain? How did he account for his returning alone? Some spurious concoction no doubt sufficed. Mayhap he related that I had drowned, or had become disorientated and failed to find my way back to the boat, or had tripped and dashed my brains out on a rock. Or it could be that he claimed I had refused to leave Perdita untended and elected to stay on the beach with her, despite his protestations. It is a matter for speculation only. You may prefer whichever scenario you see fit, scribe. As you like it. What you will.
We huddled, Perdita and I, in the defile wherein had been carved that staircase. I shielded her body with mine as the wind blew hard enough to crack its cheeks and the rain came down in torrents such as could have drowned the roofs of temples. Thunderbolts leapt and struck, as ear-splittlingly loud as an oak being cleaved in twain by some Titan’s axe. Presently I was soaked to the skin, and Perdita was shivering helplessly in my arms. I knew that if we did not find a better haven, we would neither of us survive. Gathering her up, along with the scroll and fardel, I began to ascend the steps.
It was treacherous going. The stairs were slippery underfoot. The wind made me totter with every vaunting gust. I fell and barked my shins more than once, but never did I allow injury to be visited upon Perdita. I protected her person at the expense of my own.
Then, deep within the cliff face, the stairs abruptly ended. I had climbed some fifty feet above sea level, by my estimation, yet had not gained the summit of that crag. It appeared that I had come to a dead end. Why, then, had the stairs been constructed at all? What purpose did they serve, if they went nowhere?
My puzzled dismay cleared as my rain-stung eyes espied a narrow fissure to my left. It was just large enough to admit a man. Within lay darkness. A cave of some sort.
I wormed myself into this cave, out of the elements. Half-walking, half-crawling, I penetrated it to a distance of some dozen paces, whereupon both Perdita and I were safely sequestered from the storm’s blasts. I sat back against the dark, damp wall, and with Perdita nuzzling against my breast, the both of us sodden and exhausted, I slept, and so did she.
How long did we slumber there? For as long as it took for the storm to blow itself out and some warmth to return to our bodies. By that time it was well past noon and we were both hungry. Perdita mewled, and I comforted her by letting her suckle on the tip of my smallest finger. It was a temporary measure, I knew. I had to find sustenance for her somewhere, and for myself too. That was my imperative.
I made the decision to return to the beach, but once we got there I was struck by its utter sterility, which I had not really remarked hitherto. No whelks or cockles clung to the rocks, nor any limpet. No sea kale sprouted from the shingles and no kelp floated amidst the shallows. I could not even descry any fish in the water. The bay, it seemed, supported neither fau
na nor flora. It was host to no life. Nowhere can have been deader.
I cast a glance beyond the promontories in the vain expectation of the ship still being there. Of course it was not. Nor could I see any sign of a sail on the horizon.
I trudged back up the steps to the cave. “There must be some reason these were carved here,” I mused aloud as I walked. Perdita looked up at me with her big, trusting eyes, listening intently even though she could not comprehend a word I said. “They afford access to the cave. What if the cave is a mere vestibule, a portal between the bay and some other location?”
Upon re-entering the cave my hypothesis was confirmed, for I could feel a breeze flowing across me, a zephyr I had been innocent of before, while the storm was unleashing its shocks and buffets. An air current was passing through the cave. That indicated that we were not in some blind hollow but rather a tunnel of sorts, one which might lead from shore to land proper.
Apprehensive yet hopeful, I ventured further in, with Perdita as ever in my arms.
I had no torch nor means of lighting one. I had only my probing hand and what scant illumination came in via the cave mouth. The latter soon dwindled and was gone, leaving me to rely solely on the former. Blind as winged Cupid, I fumbled along, becoming aware from the multiplying echo of my footfalls that the passage was widening and its ceiling getting higher overhead. This encouraged me to think that I was right and the cave would eventually disgorge us elsewhere, for why would it be enlarging if it were not a branch of some great subterranean system with one or more entrances inland? The fact that the floor was on a downward incline, the cave therefore drawing us deeper into the earth, was something I refused to allow to trouble me. Although I would rather we had been going upward, I consoled myself that there would at some point be a correction to this course. No descent can continue indefinitely, unless it were to take us to Hades’ realm, and even that might be welcome, for this would at least be a destination, a terminus.
Light then glimmered before me. It was clay-coloured, dim and evanescent, yet could not have been more welcome. My eyes began to apprehend the rough contours of the cave wall. I could place my feet more confidently on the ground, without having to shuffle and quest with my toes.
Shortly I found myself in a gully. The cave had opened out onto more of those uneven steps, and I clambered down them, blessing the overcast sky and the diffused glow of Helios.
I was in a town.
It took me some moments to appreciate that that was what this was: a small, secluded agglomeration of dwellings. They were not houses as you or I know them, scribe. They were stone hovels meanly burrowed out from the gully’s all but sheer sides, with misshapen doorway apertures and paltry glass-lacking windows. The most primitive residences imaginable, they rested atop one another much as a child might pile his wooden building blocks, with scant regard for order or design. Aside from these the town boasted just one other feature of note, a teetering structure at the landward end of the gully which rose perhaps two hundred cubits high. This pillar was mottled and grooved, and adorned with what appeared to be a myriad of detailed carvings, somewhat like Trajan’s Column in Rome, although at such a distance as stood between me and it I could not distinguish what they represented.
At first I assumed the town untenanted. There was only silence and stillness within the gully, as profound as at any necropolis. I had come upon some ancient fishing community, methought, whose inhabitants had long since died out or moved to pastures new. Here and there lay a discarded remnant of domesticity – a clay pot, a frayed twine net, a hatchet with a flint head. It was hard to fathom how long ago the town might once have thrived, when had been its green and salad youth. Could somewhere as unprepossessing and ill-favoured as this ever have had a heyday?
I was resolved to investigate that strange pillar, to see if I might learn something from it about the nature and origin of the town. Then, through the window of a nearby house, I caught the glint of a pair of eyes staring at me.
As my skin crawled with horror, Perdita began to cry. Whether she sensed my sudden perturbation and was instinctively responding to it, or simply could not abide her hunger pangs any more, I cannot say. Whatever the cause, she bawled as loudly and lustily as was in her power to, and her caterwaul rang across the gully, filling it to the brim with sound.
Thereupon the person who had been covertly observing us rushed out through the doorway of the house and flew towards us.
She was a woman, although the description is not wholly apt, for she was more like a tatterdemalion, or one of the Harpies of legend. She had lank, grey hair and was clad in filthy rags. Her eyes were wide and her arms flailed as she ran at us, her mouth hissing words in I know not what language. She made to seize Perdita, and I snatched the babe out of her clawing grasp and delivered her a smack with my free hand. Undaunted, the hag tried afresh to lay her paws on the child. I bellowed at her and kicked out. A dire stench emanated from her body, a stink like rotting fish, and it fair sickened me, yet I close-grappled with her and fended her off. She would not have Perdita, not while there was breath in my body.
More of the townspeople emerged from hiding, drawn by Perdita’s yelps and my shouts. They joined in the fray with an urgency I took for avarice. Though I could not discern quite why they wanted Perdita so badly, I could only assume the worst. They were all of them emaciated, starveling things, mere walking anatomies who appeared not to have eaten a decent meal in their entire lives. Appalling though the idea was, it occurred to me that they were eager to enjoy a feast of succulent infant flesh.
With their sheer numbers they overwhelmed me. Perdita was torn screaming from my clutches. I fought to regain her, battling through the throng of reeking, skeletal bodies that now surrounded her.
To my great consternation, the hag who had originally accosted us now possessed her and was spiriting her off into the house as though she had won some living trophy. I beat aside the crowd and followed. Had the townspeople been less enfeebled than they were, and I less desperate, I might not have managed this feat.
No sooner did I enter the dwelling than I was confronted with an astonishing sight. The hag had not, as I feared, set about carving Perdita up or sinking teeth into her. Far from it. The babe lay ensconced in the embrace of a younger female. This girl – for she could have been no more than sixteen or seventeen years of age – had produced a pendulous swollen dug from the folds of her threadbare tunic, and Perdita, having latched onto the teat, was taking deep and greedy suck.
The assembled townsfolk gathered in the doorway to peer in. The hag chivvied them away with blows and imprecations, screeching at them in that unknown guttural tongue of theirs which sounded to me like no language anyone had ever spoken nor should speak. They, as if reminded that they had other business to attend to, disappeared back to their homes. In no time the gully outside was empty. The town seemed again deserted.
I, for my part, was seeing the hag in a new light. This shrewish creature had been, as it were, tamed, and while I found both her and Perdita’s newfound wet-nurse repugnant, especially in such close propinquity, I also had cause to be grateful to them. This I expressed with all the courtly courtesy that was mine to employ, making low bows and other obsequies. Julius Caesar, accepting tribute from the conquered barbarians of the north, could not have been more gracious.
In return, the hag tried her utmost to explain something to me, using signals and dumb shows. She pointed to the sky, mimed stormy weather, then implied the fall of darkness, which was imminent, for dusk was already smoking the air and night was on its way. Then she pointed seaward and drew the triangular shape of the cave-mouth fissure in the air with her hands, followed by an indication of somebody walking through. I thought she was referring to me, but she repeated the action – two fingers striding like legs, over and over – until I gathered that she meant several individuals.
People were coming. That much I was able to glean. After dark, in the wake of a storm, the town received visitors.
Who those visitors might be, and their purpose, I had no conception.
But I was shortly to learn.
Perdita, stomach replete with milk, duly sank into sleep. I, meanwhile, partook of a thin fish broth the hag cooked over a pitiful flame.
Afterward, my hunger somewhat sated, I pointed back and forth significantly at Perdita’s wet-nurse and then the hag. By this means I was able to ascertain from the latter that the two of them were, as I had suspected, daughter and mother.
I then attempted to establish whether the daughter had herself lately become a mother, for why else would she be capable of giving milk? The hag affected incomprehension, but a certain furtiveness in her mien told me that she understood all too clearly what I was asking. I could only deduce that her daughter had had a baby but had lost it, perhaps to disease or infirmity. That or the child had arrived stillborn. It was, evidently, a taboo subject. The hag did not wish to discuss it, and I was consequently loath to press the point. I owed these women a debt. They were my and Perdita’s hostesses, sharing with us what meagre provision they had, and to offend them would be not only impolite but impolitic.
My assumption was that Perdita and I would be spending the night in this humble abode. Then, come morning, we would leave the town and proceed elsewhere. It struck me that my and the little princess’s fates were now inextricably bound together. The ship was gone. Captain and crew must presume us dead. On this foreign shore Perdita and I needs must accept whatever came our way. A divinity had shaped our ends, rough-hew them how we would, into something as bewildering as it was unforeseeable.
Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu Page 24