The Loneliest Man on Earth

The first time he saw her she was floating next to the boat like a dead body. Then something splashed in the darkness and glittering ripples radiated out across a moonlit ocean. He could see through the surface of the water the mysterious silhouette was actually the stark figure of a thin woman. Her arms moved silently in front of her in wide strokes one at a time. With each extension she glided closer to him. Where her legs should have kicked behind her he saw the thing he dreaded. A fat shape that pulsated behind her like it had a mind of its own. A tail. Like a fish. She was not dead at all. She was alive and she was swimming quietly through the darkness towards him. He watched, his heart beating, as she began to slink slowly, smoothly all the way around his small boat. Percy suddenly found himself fumbling nervously through the twilight, his finger on the trigger of his gun still in the holster at his hip. He tried not to make eye contact with it, but he couldn’t look away. Her slinking black shape, like a shadow in the water. A thin layer of fresh fog rolled in and through it he could see the thing’s eyes twinkling up at him with a soft blue spark. Like light catching sharp edges of finely cut crystal, the cool azure pierced the mist for an instant then quickly disappeared back into the dark water. Percy searched the smooth surface tensely. He stood anxiously, coughing into the static air. For a while he saw nothing. Everything around him seemed to stand guard silently with him. He heard nothing. The ocean was serene and smooth like luminous glass. He finally inhaled. Maybe he’d imagined her. Then, another soft splash and this time he caught her leering. Wide obsidian pupils set in thick, white eyeballs that ate him up, as her face furled past the small boat. She rolled in the water, her whole body floating upwards towards him. Billowing clouds suddenly parted overhead and Percy could see out over the entire ocean. The moon shifted shapes on the surface and his shadow transformed with the water. He squinted, struggling to see what was real through the fine, glimmering ripples. Her pale face rose up again. Then her silhouette released into a long black curve. She paused and then slunk quietly around the boat, her eyes flashing. They were crisp, ghostly marbles floating in the middle of the deep sea. Her body sauntered behind them like a snake, circling him.

Percy watched the busted mast of his makeshift boat, the crooked thing, it was useless. It stood deformed and defeated. He ran his fingertips together nervously in one pocket. They were so raw and sore. He felt his knife there too, and winced at its worn condition. It barely held a sharp edge. Chips and gashes speckled the once pristine blade. It was so dull now it couldn’t cut seaweed. He cringed, thinking about the way thick ice destroyed everything. His father’s precious Rodgers pocket knife and the only thing he had taken with him when he left. The only remaining memory of a home. Now months at the mercy of ocean elements and its age was showing. He felt so alone.

Percy breathed deeply and tried dropping his shoulders to scan the water for another still moment. His neck was sore. His back muscles twinged. He felt so weak. In the darkness everything around him seemed bigger. The ocean, the sky, the clouds, the thin rows of ripples. The beds of seaweed that flowed by in the daylight could be as big as an island. Oh how he wished he could let them carry him away from this boat. But the tangled balls of prowling sea snakes that moved across the surface of the water at sunset kept him from jumping into the shifting tides. If he were going to give up it wouldn’t be in these waters. He would rather die in his boat. The moon turned in the night and Percy recognized a feeling of dread, building. He thought of the oncoming daylight, the hot sun, and what it would feel like. He touched the fat blisters on his lips. The raw, sunburnt skin on his face. His whole body stung. Another day would be painful. He wasn’t sure he could survive it. He wished for some wind to get him away from this place. But the air was still and a thickening silence grew around him. With each passing second he felt smaller and smaller. One dot on a deep, blue, endless galaxy.

The weather hadn’t held up the last few nights, the wind and the waves had battered him, and Percy knew he was beyond drifting. He hoped, as he scanned the water squinting, that somehow the ocean would lead him to something. To land. Anything was better than being erased. Clouds moved across the moon again and he grappled for something within them. The mere glimpse of the stars only reminded him he couldn’t follow their ancient directions. A broken mast left him no way to sail. A sailor who can’t sail is as good as dead, he thought. An enormous whirlpool owned him now. He speculated he might be lucky to drift to even the smallest rock or exposed reef. Something of land to cling to like the soldier crabs and seagulls. Something that wasn’t this boat.

Percy knew the very best sailors had a strong intuition of the oceans and that they often relied on that intuition to navigate. Sailing based on internal hunches was a risk for the inexperienced but a captain with good intuition meant the difference between success and doom. A sailor with sharp intuition would also know when to trust the instruments exactly. That intuition meant knowing the difference. Now, after all this time Percy was struggling to trust his own and there were no instruments to rely on. He was alone and he was far away from everything. He smacked his parched mouth thinking, desperate to find moisture in it somewhere. Hunger had long gone. Now he was just thirsty. His fingers grasped the trigger of his pistol and he followed her as she writhed around the boat again. Watching him. He cried inside, his hands beginning to shake. There was a deadly calm about her. A steadiness, like a hunter. Nerves poured off him. He looked at the water, so still. The dinghy felt frozen to the surface like it was trapped in ice. A fresh wave of panic flushed through him. The ocean was playing its tricks. His starved mind, pushed to its limits, began to entertain that he had somehow drifted to the edge of the earth. That he might drop off the other side silently and vanish. Or a wave. An insurmountable wave could be coming. He thought. He had heard stories. He seized up imagining being crushed under the weight of all the water around him.

She was lingering. He cocked the trigger of his gun. Maybe it will go away. Maybe I will wake up from this nightmare. He begged the water.

He remembered, when he was a younger fisherman, how he had once pulled up a sunken tree trunk that had wrapped itself in kelp. It had looked like a strange sea creature floating on the surface of the water and had appeared even more odd as it crash landed onto the deck with a messy flop. It seemed to sort of roll around like a wild animal and he remembered watching it in recoil until he realized what it was. There was another time he and his crew had pulled a single guitar, still in its case, out of the serene Caribbean. He recalled the strings were rusty and had long ago popped away from the body of the warped, faded instrument. Over the weeks at sea they had worked to repair it and had even managed to locate new steel strings at port. He recalled how it had turned out to be a good find. Handy on quiet nights when the men yearned for home. Each note, as it was plucked, drifted out across the water like a pure prayer for a kiss, a home cooked meal, a few pints in a warm inn, the laughter of children. On some nights it accompanied lonely songs that simply drifted into the quiet sea air. Even a guitar that could barely be played, Percy thought back, felt like a friend to a sailor. He looked into her sharp eyes as they followed him around again and he knew. She wasn’t a friend.

She splashed, breaking the silence, rolling onto her back. Her arms wide around her head and just like that, she disappeared down into the deep. Percy waited, not daring to move. Not wanting to shake the boat. Not wanting to act afraid like her prey. He hoped to become invisible. The seconds ticked by. In a minute or two, he told himself, the nightmare will be over. In a minute or two, he could finally rest. If he could just get some sleep. If he could just shut his eyes before the sun returned he could collect his mind. Except for that nagging feeling, that thing in his gut that screamed at him. That intuition. She was still out there. He stared down into the water, searching. Then something slammed hard into the belly of the boat and it barrelled side to side with a splash and a thud. Bam. Another hard thud hit the boat. Then another. He jolted around wildly, his pistol now out of its holster, pointed at the water. A soft, dead air choked him. He felt himself hovering over a deep blackness that went on for miles beneath him.

Then, through the eerie silence he heard a soft wind pick up and gently flap through his sail. He waited. The ghost of a breeze appeared. Huge clouds parted across the moonlight and the fog shifted shapes around him. He looked to the sky, praying it would outshine the darkness closing in on him. Across the horizon he saw for just a moment a few stars twinkling. They flickered and he tried to read them far above like a divine sentence that might save him. He begged them. The clouds slid again across each other and from within their cold, dark shapes he noticed little black flecks descending down from the moon. They trickled slowly at first, a mere splatter through the puffy architecture of the sky. Just a few. Then a few more. Then more. They descended, dropping through the night in a downpour. He could see clearly now they were birds. Hundreds of birds, with pairs of wide, black wings flapping wildly in a thick spiral that was moving down in one swift current towards the water. A long, feathered, black tentacle extended down from the heavens directly towards him. He fired his pistol into the air brutishly. Each shot rebounded against hundreds of crows now cawing rapidly. His panicked shots rang out lifeless against them. With the echo of their screeching their distress seemed to grow. He watched them wide eyed as they flapped their big wings right above him and then their fat bodies suddenly barrelled in around him in thick, rapid fire. Percy covered his head as they slammed into the boat all at once.

Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.

He heard his own frightened voice escape his throat for the first time in days. A low guttural moan that didn’t sound like it belonged to him.

Bam. Thud. Bam. Thud. Bam. Thud.

They punched themselves into the boat. Flopping hard, one after another, piling their oiled, black feathers in oddly shaped lumps at his feet. He covered his face and cowered. As quickly as they had spiraled in around him, they suddenly lifted up, like a thin, black, lace curtain. Flying like a feathered tornado back into the clouds from which they had come. He had never seen anything like it.

A loud splash came again from the back of the boat and he jolted up, clicking the trigger of his gun. He was out of powder or he would have shot through the bottom of the boat. He peered over the side. Moonlight illuminated everything and there shone the water. He studied it, desperately. The deep ocean looked like shifting crystal from the surface but he knew it gave way to miles of dismal abyss, icy and cold. He felt his knees pressed against the warm mounds of feathers as he steadied himself, bracing his body as far as he could over the edge. His stomach muscles strained, aching, he balanced. The clouds parted more and the expanse of the sea opened up around him. Crows cawed in an echo that seemed to lift up over him and disappear in waves. Another splash came from somewhere and then another. Followed by a long scraping noise against the wooden belly. Percy opened his eyes wider and looked up to the moon. He watched the birds above still flying in a strange, imperfect unison. They drifted out against the moon and dove through the clouds, scattering themselves across the opening sky. He touched his ear to the bottom of the boat, closed his eyes again and listened. His blood ran cold. Something was there. He could hear it flicking the belly of the boat. There she was. His heart pounding, he shot around the side of his boat again. Her eyes moved through the water like gems scattering. He could make out her face now. A human face. Framed between light shoulders that extended out into thin arms that waded around methodically. Behind a skeletal torso, a scaly tail seemed to slink like a curious shark, side to side. Sweat dripped off his brow plopping onto the surface of the water. She’s real, he thought. Her eyes widened inside her bobbing head and as she looked at him, he fell deep into the softness. They hung there together for a moment sharing a gaze through the water like the furthest stars hung together in the galaxy. Her features began to change and a smile crawled across her cheeks revealing a snarled set of razor sharp teeth. Her thin arms reached out towards him as if to grab him and pull him into the dark water with her. He flinched, breaking eye contact. He could now see at the end of her delicate hands were long fingertips that curled into claws. If he had had the strength to scream he would have. His knees buckled and he fell into the belly of the boat with a hard thud. He covered his face and curled his body into itself just as something grazed the side of the vessel again. A quiet whimper escaped his throat and he shuddered, feeling sick to his stomach. Another splash and then another, followed by a long scraping noise that moved all the way around the bottom of the small boat. Percy opened his eyes wide again looking up to the moon. He hoped he was losing his mind. The birds above still flew in circles scattered against ghostly cloud shadows. The moon was fading. He rolled back over to lift himself to the edge of the boat. Peering back into the water, he saw them now. All of them. Hundreds of them. All with the same black marble eyes and the same piercing, blue glow beaming from within. All staring straight at him. Some showed their sharp teeth in a wide grin. Some stared, stone faced and quizzical. Their tangled heads of hair floated around their sunken skulls and below each one he could see more and more. Hundreds of glowing eyes that dotted the water down into a deepness where everything finally faded to black. It looked so cold.

He tumbled into the boat covering his heart with one hand, holding it inside his chest. The water stirred around him more violently and the boat started to spin. At first slowly. Clockwise. Then faster and faster. Faster and faster until he finally yelled out into the darkness, “Oh Pleeease!” He pleaded to the moon. His voice echoed into the silence and he jerked himself upright remembering his pistol. As he looked back out over the dark water, each black eye socket swirled, dizzying him. There, like the stars above, dozens of eyes glowed a piercing blue and churned the deep water around his small skiff. He squeezed his eyelids tight, trying to erase the picture in his mind. Telling himself over and over, This isn’t real. This isn’t real. This isn’t happening. This isn’t real.

There was another scrape on the bottom of the boat and he gasped as the vessel shook in a way no wave or wind could shake it. He had heard of mermaids but these creatures were different. These beings were the stuff of darkness, the stuff of fishermen’s nightmares. His shakes were uncontrollable as he tried desperately to steady his body with his hands. There was another sharp scrape and a heavy splash. The birds above cawed into the sky and Percy felt ill as he looked at the shiny, black, feathered bodies dead and scattered in his boat. Suddenly the vessel rocked side to side. It jolted harshly and Percy let out a hollow cry. Another scrape and splash and the boat spun again around and around and around. Faster this time. Then in one quick, silent dip, it tipped over and before he could let out a scream, Percy splashed into the dark water.