At the edges of wrath

Awakened by the pinching of crabs and completely unaware of my whereabouts, I started to run like a madman towards the oceanic waves, while filling the space with joyful screams. Nothing to be worried about, considering the circumstances. The fiery sand was scattering under my feet. My eyes could barely see and my lips were as dry as gunpowder. A person would have only heard the echo of my voice. But there was no men. And silence that floated in the air was deafening. 

     Although the shock from jump in the shallows sent pain all over my body, it was more than worth the torment. From all the things I have been through for the last seven days, being stuck on a deserted island definitely seemed to be the best of all of them. The horror that I have witnessed on the tenth of october could not be described within the boundaries of this reality. But I will try to do so.

      It is of crucial importance for you to have trust in my words, for the facts that I am about to present here are far more abominable and stranger than any piece of fiction. Believe me that I was not stumbled by the sudden vertigo (which was the result of living five days without food) while I was celebrating being alive. Believe me, that reddish burns on my skin and opened fracture of my left arm wrist felt like a mosquito bite, compared to the suffering that I experienced. Believe me when I say that the reasons for my insanity are justified. Because otherwise, you will not be able to comprehend this story.

     I am not sure that my memory will serve me well after everything. I do believe it was five days before our doom, when captain Theocritus asked me to join him in his cabin, while I was searching for any kind of land from the mast. It was the morning of october the fifth. Until that encounter, I did not notice that some strange and utterly creepy tics were being born on his face. And how could've I? He was hiding in his cabin for the past nine days. The man was the definition of mystery and ominousness.

     There is a certain moment in a man's life when an obsession meets the walls of actuality. Then, like a rising river that has being held on for too long in a cramped space, it bursts and annihilates every common sense. Bricks of reason lose their weight and sail in an endless sea of the former mind. And I thought, after our conversation, that is when I woke up, that captain reached that breaking point.

     “Tell me something, my friend… Are you a happy man?” he asked me as soon as I closed the door of the cabin. Never before was he so official while speaking, making me feel uneasy from the beginning. Calling me a friend was not the word he would use in the past, but I always knew that we carried the same respect and admiring for each other. There was a certain trail of true and honest bravery in both of us. We met twelve years ago, and went through a lot, so that was not a surprise.

     The sheer shine and size of his green eyes were enough to light up the whole room, even though he was standing with his back faced against the window. There, in his little chamber, I could smell the mixture of his breath and some stolen champagne sprawling through the air. That served me as a reminder that there is still something human inside of those four walls that, while I was not watching, seemed to suck up all the life and brightness of a once glorious ship.

      “Aye sir. I guess I am.” My voice was not as deep as it usually is.

      “My God.” he said, with a little annoyance on his face.“You can call me by name, Isidor. I am not gonna throw you to the sharks for that.”

     I nodded. Albeit window behind him was almost as wide as the cabin itself, I felt the dimming of daylight with each of his new step toward me. There was a good reason for that. Theocritus was probably not only the tallest pirate, but the tallest man I have ever seen. If with a certainty I can say that I am exactly six feet tall, he was at least, with a complete sureness, ten inches taller than me.

     As he looked me straight in the eye, slight grin formed on his face.

     “Well I am not. And maybe I am just a fool after all. I spent fifty six years of my life trying to find any kind of meaning to all of this, but I could not help myself. I've always thought that there must be something more, hidden from us. Not in the ocean depths or the vastness of space, but buried deep down in an unknown states of mind and existence. As years went by, I became a desperate soul of a creature. And just when it seemed that I've wasted my whole life, it happened. All the answers to the greatest questions were shown to me on my voyage through dreams. It changed me, but there are no regrets. There is nothing here for me anymore. For I have discovered the meaning!”

     His smile was bigger than ever, and it made his appearance all the more grotesque.

     “So I need you to stay alive for a long time, especially for the next few days or so. I want you to spread the word of the treasure that I have discovered, about what will happen and what I will become when it's all over. It's impossible to explain with words, so I need you to see it for yourself. I do believe that you are far more capable to tell the world about the things you are yet to witness than any other sailor on this ship. And it may be impossible after all, but with every of your senses wide-opened, try to do your best. When it ends, I hope that you will be able to say something. Anything. Because I will be somewhere and sometimes else. Remember, to be happy and to know a lot in life is but a breeze of the sea compared to what a dead man learns in nothingness.”

     As he spoke, movements of his arms and excitement on his face were chasing the words that were running out of his mouth. He went to the chest in the corner of the room, while I was contemplating his words and possible scenarios of the upcoming adventure. Questions kept rising and falling in my mind, faster and bigger than any lumbering wave. But nothing from this cosmos could have prepared me for what I saw then.

     The thing he pulled out of the chest was, and will remain indescribable with the human words and languages. Numbness I felt when I layed my eyes on it came from another dimension and my bones swimmed around my body in the ocean of gore. It was all in once; a sphere, a triangle, a cube and tons of others shapes and I saw them all simultaneously. I was hovering over something that no longer looked like a ship's ground. A mass of everything and nothing loomed over me and all around me, and at the same time in myself. Colorlessly transparent, yet filled with a palette of tints and hues that I did not know could exist. Every event in the history of the universe, all the ups and downs of the future, every momentary happening and all the spaces became one, spinning before my eyes like a drunken leaf in the wind. Something was squeezing my chest from all sides, yet like never before, I was breathing with full lungs. How was my mind able to comprehend these things in the first place? Dozen of seconds in front of it was enough to make me dizzy, and dozen more made me lose my consciousness. The last thing that has popped into my brain was how the silly little ants whirled their dance at the edges of wrath.

***

     The slap that woke me up was so powerful that it took me less than five seconds to completely come to my senses. Pain came much faster than that. I felt like there was a little man inside of my head, hammering the walls of my skull with a mallet, trying to get out and celebrate his freedom. My stomach was as empty as my rum stocks, even though I ate half an hour before passing out. Every contact my skin would have made with anything was a needle in a nerve. But why would they drag me to my bed, and why was my beard a bit longer than this morning? I kept asking myself these and a lot more reasonable questions, when Theocritus said something that made my eyes pop out and sent chills down my crooked spine.

     “Alright lad, time has come. You don't look bad for someone who slept five days and five nights.”

     “No. That's not possible. How did y-”

     “There is no time to explain now! And even if there was, my stories and arguments would not make any difference, for neither I nor anyone else can understand these things or put it in a complete simplicity.”

     Out of nowhere, the ship leaned sideways at lightning speed, as if it had hit an iceberg. But nothing could be heard below the deck, nor could I see any leaking water from the floor.

     “Come on! Get up and come to the deck with me now. We have arrived.”

     As I was following him, I noticed that only he and I were in the lower deck. And then I stepped on the upper.

     Seven heads were looking at me from seven little powder kegs. If someone was to observe them from the air, their arrangement would've made a perfect heptagon. That was the thing that terrified me the most at that moment. Not their faces, which seemed to call for help, even though their bodies were God knows where and there was no any kind of help for them. Not the traces on the floor in front of them made out of blood, that formed some kind of language all over the wood that no man on this planet could understand. It was the perfect heptagon that creeped out the core of my mind and soul. Was it the genuine perfection of it or something else, I will never know. And there, in the middle of it, layed the chest.

     There was no storm, but reddish and black clouds have extinguished the Sun. The waves that I saw were so big, that just a thought of them made me go crazy a bit. 

     Theocritus, having nothing to say to me, started to read bloody words while he was walking towards the chest. He repeated the same sentences multiple times, as he pulled that thing out and raised it to the skies. I didn't want to look at it for too long, and thus I probably prevented another blackout. And as soon as he touched it, all the heads opened their eyes and started to scream. Like a waterfall, liters of blood began to pour out of their mouths, and their eyes went completely white, almost glowing. They yelled and vomited at the same time.

     Carried away by what is now a destroyed mind, I ran to the life-saving boat. Not a single thing made me look back, until I was at a safe distance from an upcoming gigantic wave. It was the father of all waves.

     Swinging of the boat didn't stop me from finally turning around and seeing the face of wrath. The face that sent out its menacing smile towards the boat and laughed as loud as all the thunders of the world combined. And even though I saw a lot before that, I couldn't stop myself from thinking how in the name of God can a wave laugh.

     A colossal figure that emerged from the wave was a creature, if it was that at all, completely made out of the deepest oceanic waters. In its hands it carried a water spear which was as long as the wave from which it was born. With the speed that transcended the wind, it thrust its point in what now looked as a Theocritus' silhouette. Claw's creek and its crew disappeared from my sight as I was waiting for the same faith to come and get me.

     That is the last thing I remember. I woke up here, I don't know where I am nor how long was I unconscious. I don't know if I will ever get out of this island. And I'm writing this on a piece of paper with a pen that was packed in a bottle with it. A paper that at first glance was blank. A paper that I have accidentally dropped in the sea which then revealed its content:

      “To be happy and to know a lot in life is but a breeze of the sea compared to what a dead man learns in nothingness”.