Borne by Storms

  The wind’s wail was a constant presence: it droned from the creaking window latches, from the thrumming stone walls, from the thrice-locked door that sagged and heaved with each squall as though the lighthouse itself drew breath. The wail settled into the kitchen and wrapped around Cade more tightly than the woolen blanket he wore—it draped over him as he slept, heavier than the patchy quilt he’d brought from home.

Somewhere in his dilapidated chambers, there was surely a clock, but time and its precise, hour-long demarcations meant little at Cliffpoint.  The storms knew no reprieve; there was only the continual howl of the wind, the pattering of rain, the shuddering as the cliff itself was pummeled by the waves below. The passing of time was measured in more practical ways: since last-meal, Cade had twice changed the bucket that caught the drip! drip! drip! invading the lighthouse’s antechamber. With the rate that the third was now filling, Cade reasoned that perhaps the storm was diminishing—or maybe time itself was slowing down.

Cade was cooking over a rusting wood-fire stove; Cade was lying in his bed, counting the speckles on the roof. Cade was puzzled by wooden blocks and a strange doll that were left in the study; then, he was carving them, though he could not recall why. Cade was wiping down the tower light, still skin-burning hot from a day’s continual glare; Cade was wiping in the privy as the walls shifted and shook about him, rain dripping onto his nose. His time at Cliffpoint was a singular moment stretched out to a timeless, dreary eternity: if the storm was endless, then so, too, were his days.

With a splash of water, he awoke. He was in the workroom, rearranging the wrenches. The wind calmed for a moment, and Cade heard a distant thump! thump! thump!

Such a sound was generally unremarkable. After all, the wind was prone to slamming shutters and lifting latches, or occasionally carrying heavy branches from the woodlands a mile south. And yet, Cade’s ear latched to the regularity of the knocking, its persistence, its urgency.

Cade frowned as he stood. He didn’t quite know today’s date, but his shift at Cliffpoint was to last four months—surely, his relief was still several weeks away.

He wobbled as he strode on the creaking, soggy floorboards, unsure if it was their swelling that stumbled him, or if it was just an effect of his months of stationary isolation in his tempestuous place. The knocking grew louder as he drew nearer to the front door. One latch at a time, Cade disengaged the three brass locks that kept the wind from prying the tower door open.

Cade cracked the door; immediately, the gales gripped it and flung the door wide—it nearly ripped from its hinges as it swung out and back, cracking against the tower’s wall. The drenched woman on the other side didn’t flinch away.

Her face was haggard and sunken in; her ruddy blonde hair fell in wind-whipped tangles. She shifted on antsy legs, bearing a miserable posture that befit the miserable weather.

Come inside, Cade gestured with an arm, as shouting above the keening wind would be futile.

The woman, in response, shook her head. Come outside, her gesture countered. She pointed down the narrow stone pathway towards the cliff’s base, barely visible beneath the sheeting rain.

Cade stood firm and shook his head, planting his feet for visual emphasis. With gusts like these, the stone stairs were death.

The woman took a single step toward the door, shouting over the winds. No mere woman could ever outmatch the thunderheads of the southern shore, angry as they were in these summer months, but a few words slipped through the cracks in the storm’s fury: shipwreck, help, rocks.

“It’s no use,” Cade called to the storm, doubting she could hear him. “Can’t help in a torrent like this. Have to wait.” He moved his lips in wide, exaggerated shapes as he spoke.

The woman walked even closer, bringing Cade a momentary thrill of relief that she would not join the drowned. But she stopped in the doorway, unwilling to enter. She stood, chest rising and falling in gasping breaths, close enough for him to smell the stench of soggy wool and rotting wood and salted sweat on spoiled leather. A sailor, then—a survivor. “Please,” she breathed, a sound lost to the wind but all-too-readable in the forlorn look of her eyes. “My baby is still aboard. A child—an infant.”

***

Cade hadn’t bothered with a raincoat.

A rope hung in loose cords from his belt—a pack on his back housed a hammer, an ax, a pick. Those tools had been close by the door; gathering anything else would’ve meant too much time wasted. Cade wasn’t even sure what he was supposed to do: he couldn’t un-sink a ship, and Cade had always been a simple man best suited to simple work. And yet, beyond any and all sense, he was braving the storms, barely able to keep up with the woman who still hadn’t even shared her name. She all but flowed down the winding stone stairs… around her, water sluiced down in turbulent cascades.

As Cade wobbled down after the woman, he felt the rush of water pressing at the backs of his shins, firmly spurring him along. Footholds were thus treacherous—a slip now, and he’d tumble down the remaining six-dozen steps to a bone-breaking end. The guard ropes were slick and slimy in his hands; their wobbling inconstance was nearly no help at all, and the shifting squalls were a hand pulling and tugging at him, trying to send him toppling.

Cade’s body protested: rain was in his eyes, it soaked through his clothes, it weighed down his boots. Cade mind raced: the winds would throw him over the cliffs, the woman’s companions were waiting in ambush, the rain itself would drown him where he stood.

But then, impossibly, the gales lessened, and the rain lightened to a persistent, pattering drizzle. He all but stumbled down the final few steps and turned towards the beach, rounding the edge of the cliff. As he slicked the rain from his brow, what Cade saw on that beach made him gasp:

The once-proud vessel was now a shattered, grotesque sight to behold. The ship was impaled on the rocks like the prey of a mad shrike: its hull was hideously breached, the sturdy oaken planks splintered and rent apart like brittle twigs by the merciless fangs of the jagged rocks. The foremast hung at an obscene angle, its sails tattered into ribbons that flapped lifelessly in the fitful wind like the last dying gasps of a punctured man.

The proud, carved figurehead that had once bravely sliced through countless waves was hideously disfigured by the wreck, the right half of its face and body nowhere to be seen amidst the churning maelstrom of white foam and debris. The quarterdeck was partially submerged, its own railings torn away to allow the frigid sea to slosh in and out with each malevolent swell.

Cade's gaze drifted up to the ornate carvings at the very back. There he saw the most chilling sight: a solitary body, limbs splayed at unnatural angles, lashed by fraying ropes to the remnants of the ship's hull. The man's sightless eyes seemed to bore into Cade's very soul, accusing him for bearing witness to this maritime massacre.

A low, ominous groan escaped from the wreckage as a powerful breaker slammed into the shattered broadside. It was the sound of a tortured leviathan crying out in its final agonizing throes… the entire scene reeked of tragedy, loss, and low tide… of the implacable supremacy of nature over the feeble works of man. Cade was humbled; Cade was terrified.

The woman scrambled up the rope rigging that still hung over the ship’s side with surprising dexterity. Cade followed, but his climb was clumsy and wobbling. His youth was long behind him, but his daily routine meant he was at least no stranger to climbing the lighthouse stairs. One fistful of knotted, soggy rope at a time, Cade lumbered up the ship’s side and pitched himself over the rail. He collapsed onto its crooked top deck, wheezing. The entire ship rattled and shook as its starboard side was pummeled by another breaker, but it remained impaled on the rocky spires.

Cade stood, and immediately he yelped: the corpse was close enough for the stench to carry in the damp air. A captain’s hat was stuck to his head, perhaps only held in place by the sticky matte of blood that coated his head. The captain’s wheel, like that of any good vessel, was covered by wooden handles. By the twist of the sagging captain’s body, Cade knew he was impaled onto his wheel; he’d been at the helm when the ship was flung to the rocky shore.

“In here,” the woman called, and Cade pulled himself away from the grisly scene. He turned towards the voice, eyeing the dark stairway of the companionway. Pressing against its slick sides to avoid a fall, Cade crept into the creaking bowels of the ship. He entered what might have once been the fo’c’sle. Though no lanterns guttered in their sconces, the interior was well lit: holes punched in the side of the ship let in surging ocean mist and daylight, casting sharp beams of light amid the woodchips and shattered sundries. The storm, too, invaded through those holes, but Cade nearly found its constant torrent more comforting than the eerily still interior. The bulkheads rumbled with the rain’s trickling against the hull.

“Here,” the woman called again, and Cade proceeded through the tilted hatch to an even lower deck. As his eyes adjusted to this darker level, he saw an angry column of rock jutting up through the orlop into his current deck—its rim glowed with queasy daylight, and the ship’s wood screeched and scratched as waves shifted it around its impaling shaft.

“Right here.”

Cade saw the woman now, standing before a canted set of doors. With the spilled charts and upturned desks nearby—and with the intricate carving and garish coat of paint at the entryway—Cade supposed it might have been the captain’s quarters. Blocking the door was an overhead beam that had pulled loose from the ceiling. The woman gripped at it, but the thing would not move.

Cade removed the ax from his pack and waved her back. He then brought the ax down in a swift, overhead chop. His first try was too spirited—the blade struck the red door and dragged a jagged line down its front. The rebound of the blade nearly ended with an ax head embedded in Cade’s side.

The second swing landed true, and the ax bit into the plank with satisfying depth. Cade pried it loose and swung again, and again, losing himself to the exertion in the cramped, tilted companionway.

At long last, his blade punched through, and Cade pulled the blocking bar aside. He tried the door handle—and blessedly, the thing swung open into the cabin.

Only now did Cade hear the wailing of the infant… its cries mirrored the wind’s howl. Cade ducked beneath the half-chopped plank and entered the captain’s quarters, a scene as disastrous as the rest of the ship. A canopy bed was in sogging tatters in the room’s corner. A carved, oaken desk was overturned, and quills, inkbottles, astrolabes, and sextants crunched underfoot as Cade walked to the room’s corner.

There, perfectly illuminated by a hole in the wall, a baby’s carriage sat upright—bolted to the hull itself. Its occupant wriggled and writhed beneath the sheeting rain that invaded through the break in the wall. Cade lifted the child, freeing her from the rain—her fragile life was a miracle in this place of death.

Cade turned around, intending to hand the baby to her mother, but he saw nobody else in the tilted, ruined cabin.

“Miss?”

Only silence answered back.

Cade hugged the wailing infant as he made his way back to the darkened deck; he clutched her tight as he ascended in the companionway, assuming the mother would be waiting on the top deck. When he reached the empty deck, he called for her, but his shouting was lost to the rain—and by the distant crack of thunder, the storms promised to return in their full, frightening fury.

With a shiver, Cade unpacked his tools and set the infant into his pack. He gripped to the ropes and began the climb downwards to the beach below, praying that the mother would leave whatever business in the ship kept her—the winds were rising.

***

“Help us to understand, Mr. Cade.”

The claims officer pushed his spectacles further up his nose and set his notebook onto the desk. Beyond the lighthouse walls, the storm raged on, but its wrath was kept at bay by the babbling of the baby that Cade still had no name for.

“How many times do I need to tell the same tale? She never made it off the boat.”

The claims officer took a puff of his pipe, scratching his chin. “Crews have finished their preliminary assessment of the disaster aboard the Spring Breeze. Most helpful to this investigation was the discovery of the Captain’s Logbook. It’s a good thing they make that paper more-or-less waterproof.”

“Seems like a good idea,” Cade agreed.

The claims officer took a long draw from his pipe and then exhaled, watching the smoke clouds billow upwards. “Mutiny, three weeks back—attempted, at least. Chief instigator hanged, tied to the ship. You saw him, by your story.”

Cade swallowed.

“Mutiny took a lot of lives before it was quelled—by the time the ship ran ashore, it seems like only six men survived.”

“Five men and a woman?” Cade offered.

“Six men,” the claims officer repeated, voice dry as aged tobacco. “The logbook is quite clear—the only adult woman on the sailing was the captain’s wife, traveling across seas to their new homestead. She was the first to die in the mutiny: pistol shot to the face.” The claims officer mimed a finger-gun, pointed at Cade’s head.

“Then the book lied—there’d be plenty of reason for the Captain to claim she died, if he was fearful for her safety. Maybe she stowed away—”

“We found the body,” the officer interrupted. “Orlop deck; the cook’s cabin became a makeshift morgue. Ruddy blonde hair, female organs, gunshot wound to the face—a definitive end. No stowaway. She was the only woman on the manifest, save for the child.”

Cade shivered, remembering the woman who’d once stood at his lighthouse door—her hair, too, had been a ruddy blonde, matted and gnarled by the rain.

“So, it doesn’t make a damn lick of sense,” the claims officer said. “Here’s the story that goes on our report: a passer-by noted the wreck, reported it to you, and then went home.”

Cade couldn’t help but laugh aloud, a shrill thing that cracked the air like lightning. “A passer-by,” he repeated. “Out for a stroll in the middle of a storm—who directs me to an infant trapped in a cabin on a shipwreck that she’d never been aboard.”

The claims officer nodded his head, now chewing at his pipe more than puffing it. “What other answer have you got?”

Cade sighed, watching the babbling child sitting amid the small, wooden toys that Cade had carved for her. The blocks were stacked into a wide pile, and the doll was placed atop the tallest of them—perhaps the captain of a blocky ship in the child’s eyes. How long ago had the shipwreck been? How long had this man been here with his clacking, gnawed pipe and scribbling pens?

“You’d think normally moments happen one after another… but here, it’s… somehow, it’s all at once,” Cade said, frowning. “Events don’t always fall on a line—it all runs together, like the mud in the rain. Time isn’t right here.”

The claims officer issued a tight smile. “Of course it isn’t, Mr. Cade. You’ve been through a great ordeal… we’ll take the child to the city and see she is cared for. You, yourself, should seek a reprieve from your work… the ship’s surgeon had a stock of barbiturates. We’ll leave them here; take what you need. I’ll also be putting in a request to the city for your relief to come a few months ahead of schedule… what a terrible thing to happen only two weeks into a four-month shift.”

The claims officer shook Cade’s hand and dipped his hat as he left. Cade watched through the open doorway as he rejoined his fellows at the base of the cliff. As their carriage disappeared into the wet, windy expanse of gray, Cade scratched at the back of his head and listened to the wailing of the wind…

Its sound was multifaceted. It was the agony of the cliffs, it was the sighing of the storms. It was the grinding of wind against rock and the crashing of waves on stone. Its drone was rounded out with the grinding and splintering of wood on sharpened spires of unforgiving earth… and above it all, like the dominant instrument in a cacophonous ensemble, there was the unmistakable, mournful keening of the infant orphaned by the winds and borne by the storms.