A Last Note from Andrew Layton

I should write that this confession comes from nobler motivations than what it is: fear. But I cannot – I am afraid, and my fear grows by the hour. I am sorry for the course I am about to take, and I regret the weakness which dictates my actions, but in hard confessions the truth should not be subordinated to pretense. I will adhere to that dictum now. I write this because I am about to take my life, a trespass which may very well consign my soul to Hell’s damnation. I fear for myself. But I have traded for this sin one greater, whose transgression’s possibility I now escape.

You will find this note in the breast pocket of my companion, one John Roberts, a stronger man than I. Should he be recovered, it will be alone in our small vessel, likely adrift in the Celebes Sea or Makassar Strait. Let the reader know that this world contains evil – true Evil distilled from philosophical abstractions and made manifest for the corruption of men. Take care, fellow mariner.

We were the last of the crew of the trading vessel Orion. One month prior, our ship sank off the Sulu archipelago. The disaster was sudden, having struck an obstruction in the open ocean at dusk. We took on water at a violent pace, and despite the valiant efforts of the crew, within minutes the vessel submerged, and all that sturdy lot of men were pulled into the depths below. I, Andrew Layton; the ship’s physician, and Roberts; an able bosun, were the only ones to escape the drag of the wreckage and surface. We found by God’s grace an untethered life-boat. It only had one oar, and that shattered to splinters, but it was afloat, and we were saved. In the morning we found ourselves adrift in an overcast ocean of unusually placid nature, the dark current languishing in bloated rolling waves. A constant wind wailed overhead, lyrics on the tune of nature’s apathy.

After three days it rained. Blessed buckets of it down upon us, so much that we had to bale and struggle to keep the small vessel from foundering into the depths. We sang and drank as much as our bodies could. In that squall I first noticed the creature. It was of an immense and pallid body and conspicuously amorphous shape. Its size and general demeanor reminded me of a larger species of whale; however, its movements were jarring and quick. Beyond that we could not conjecture. Only the shimmer of its white body and dwarfing size were discernable, all other features denoting biological assemblage being hidden in the black miasma of the depths. It would submerge and reappear again in what seemed a general circumnavigation of our position. At first, I took this for a sign of curiosity; it perhaps being one of the cleverer cetaceans, although of a form unfamiliar to me. It did inspire us with wonder at first. But seemingly benign and growing accustomed to it, we soon paid it no mind.

Eventually the squalls ended, and we were left again in a listless desert. Hunger temporarily satiated by water now returned. A week. Then Two. Blessed sprinklings of rain kept us alive, but just. We talked. Sometimes at length in common fraternity, others in bitter conflict separated by the natural gulfs between men of fundamentally differing natures. But we agreed – If doom came, to die as men. We would not take to the poorly euphemistic “custom of the sea” that lurked in barstool tales of desperation and inhumanity.

Oaths are easier made than kept. Clawing and fantastical sheets of pain accompanied a steady excavation of my chest and abdomen. We grew weak. I found myself analyzing my compatriot, tracing the contours of his features, and imagining the living tissue underneath. Ligaments connecting the patella and fleshy muscle fibers of the tibialis, the caloric bounty therein. In the white-capped waves I saw the countenance of my drowned compatriots, bone white faces and empty sorrowful eyes distending. Their empty and undulating gaze beckoned my thoughts along darker paths into byways of sudden violence and gratified instinct.

As I wasted and my mind began to sunder, I could swear the boat would begin rocking with aberrant disturbances in the water, as some tectonic body was realigning itself under the waves. In such moments, I swear the shimmering expanse would appear near the surface like a voyeur in observation of my degradation. And with such thoughts, in my mind I felt an alien and wicked glee, a mirth for the profane vulgarity indulging my blasphemous fantasies. Then I would shake myself free and steel my mind.

I am a weaker man than Roberts, who carried on as before. He spoke of currents, the dissembling of constellations, and idle conversations to distract. He carried hope. To whoever is reading this, know that John Roberts was a brave and consummate mariner.

It was in the following nights that I came to know the evil of the shimmering presence. I had been laying with my head against the stern, watching Roberts sleep in fitful and shaking breaths when I turned and looked out at the water. The cadaverous obscurity had risen again from the depths. As mentioned, we had by then become accustomed to the it, and our degrading condition had by then rendered it a reliable presence in the shared nightmare. I looked with apathy at the thing.

Then, just below where my head lay on the surface of the wooden hull, a tapping began. Not the steady tempo that comes with some nautical obstruction caught in the rhythms of the current, but a slow and deliberate wrapping at irregular intervals. Its presence alone did not disturb my mind, which had become accustomed to flights of the bizarre and surreal, but there was something familiar about it. Something which beckoned the normalcy of life before, and skills learnt in half-forgotten rote memorization. Then my eyes widened and my heart filled with lead.

Morse Code.

Hurriedly I took out a swath of paper and pencil, treasures that had been on my person when our misfortune struck (the same utensils I am using now) and began to write out the cryptograph. Long Pork. A white needle shot through me somewhere, deep. Just Long Pork.

I looked where Roberts lay stretched out, his head against the stern and his shoeless and cracked feet almost touching mine. His terribly thin frame undulating under strained breaths. And the Tapping.

He will die. Will you?

The impossible had become manifest and my objective perception was lost in a haze. For those who have experienced such shifts in reality, they know that intuition may quickly identify and adapt the mind to new modes of navigation. With trembling fingers, I began tapping my response, tapping ever so lightly, lest my companion awake and and I seem mad.

Our discourse held through the night, and much calculation and fumbling errors were made, but this is the transcript as best I can relate:

His blood will save you.

It is a man.

His meat will save you.

His name is Roberts.

He is gone but you are not.

He is not meat he is a man.

He will die and then you will die and be two corpses for the water.

You are evil.

I am the truth.

It is a fantastical thing to write down, and I suppose the reader will consider me hallucinatory. Under the sterile guidance of reason, that is a fair and prudent course. I spent my life a materialist and would render the same judgement. But these were the things experienced in that thin and broken place between the black sky and black water in the void of that night.

Near dawn the creature grew silent. It eventually disappeared into the depths, causing a rippling disturbance that rocked the boat. Between the lapping subduction of water against the wood and the barren cry of wind in the air I could hear the uncanny mimicry of rolling laughter. I knew its author was the loitering shade stalking my fugitive thoughts. Then I understood the evil of the beast. It was intelligent and had designs and I feared for my mortal soul.

The days continued and Roberts spoke less. His eyes became listless and when he slept his breath became shallower. The thing continued to torment me. In the day my mind was plagued by fleeting divergences of inhumanity, and at night the hull tapped with the taunting harangue of the demon below.

It was hope that has broken the last bit of me. Yesterday, as we lay rocking in the current, Roberts pointed to the horizon. A vertical shape clearly broke the axis of the water. It was merely a black spot, a dark protuberance, but it was visible. Perhaps a ship, maybe land. But it was real. We both saw it. We did not exclaim or shout then, but braced ourselves and went to work. With bodies on fire, we struggled to each side of the vessel and paddled with our hands and remaining splintered oaring; muscles screaming and our labored breath playing a medley of sadness with the lapping waves. We were methodical in our efforts, taking rests every quarter hour. Slowly, despairingly slowly, we made progress. After two hours it was perceptively closer by the smallest of increments. A rock - land!

That was when we made our mistake. We let hope into our hearts. We shouted and cried out, exclaiming and grabbing each other’s shoulders. The shimmering obscurity, which had been absent that morning ascended, seemingly summoned by our calls. Rather than taking an adjacent position as it had been, its obscured and cadaverous mass appeared directly below our small craft. The sheer scale and apparent focus upon us quieted our exclamations.

The boat jerked. Not in the manner of a curious probing nudge, nor in the way of a mindless and animal attack, but like a giant hand snatching an item from free space with stern purpose. We froze, unsure if the being had finally become predatory, its interest in our vessel until then a sort of stalking game on the hunt.

We began to move. Not downward or side to side, but in a deliberate, almost mechanical course in the opposite direction. We looked over the sides, but could find no discernable force of propulsion, just the expanse of the pale obscured creature about us. We yelled. We screamed. In short order we abandoned reason. We pleaded, negotiated, begged with the thing. I even tried to stab at it with our broken oar, but only pierced black waters. There was no answer to us, just the rippling wake of our reversing course.

The rock in the distance faded and disappeared over the horizon. Eventually the light of the day began to dim. At some point our journey ended, and by then we had collapsed in despair and sunk into our craft, any tears we had left having been spent. When I next looked over the side of the craft the waters were dark and empty.

The morning is dawning. A thick and ugly fog has rolled in. I spent the night watching Roberts’ fitful sleep. Around two hours ago his frame ceased its bitter rhythm of breath.

He has died.

He is stronger than I, for even now the hateful clawing and vile council stalks the corridors of my thoughts. We may make landfall, but I doubt it. I am hungry.

Hunger.

Hunger is just a word. A blind heuristic which the mind guesses at with grasping syllables. It is an impotent salve to mask the hatred the body has for the spirit. An errant wanderer amongst the Titan gods of Earth that grab man by the throat and pull him close so his eyes may not turn away and his screams leach the soul out. The gods of hateful truth, of the bleaching sun and dashing rocks and chilling rain and fever and murder. Hunger is an interloper, a speck amongst this pantheon. And towering above this imp is the white god for whose name there is no ink black enough. The god of the depths below that relishes in the destruction of the spirit through betrayal of the senses, laughing and dancing with the other gods of pain, the only true gods that man has ever known.

I forget myself. I cannot win. If I stay in this vessel, I will tear into Roberts and consume his bitter flesh. It will be an unholy communion, and I will belong to the pallid dweller below – and I know that will be worse than having never existed.

So ends my confession and undoubtedly fantastic account. I am weak of will and so turn to the only victory I can conjure. I will slip into the endless ocean and forfeit my life rather than face an eternity having capitulated. Mayhap the thing will eat me.

Let it choke on my bones.

*

Layton finished the letter with the broken nub of the pencil and rolled up the paper with shaking hands. Slowly and with resolve he leaned forward and got to his knees in the middle of the lazily rocking boat. Moving like a man twice his age, he leaned over the rigid crewman and began to turn him over, gently as possible. There was a strange cry, almost a sob, and a desperate motion of knotted joints and elastic muscles below him. A dull yet sharp pain entered him and took the wind from his lungs.

Roberts pushed harder on his elbows and the sharp wood of the broken oar he’d been grasping pierced deeper into Layton’s sunken abdomen. The emaciated man dropped the piece of paper and rolled on to his back, breathing shallowly and mouthing something inscrutable. Roberts breathed quickly and leaned against the stern, watching the man slowly dying. The god below had been speaking to him, whispering at night and warning him of the physician. He had noticed the way the man had been looking at him, how he was eyeing him for murder and consumption.

He had not wanted to believe it, but the Voice had assured him of danger. So, he had tested the man, feigning weakness over the days. His fellow had failed the trial. He would do what he had to, by God, and he would survive. He felt the boat gently rock and saw the familiar shimmer, his guardian, slowly rising. He crawled over the now stilled doctor.

In the inscrutable fog, a bell tolled as a ship drew near.

The waters churned, echoing laughter.