Until recently, all who knew me thought me dead. They thought me a sunken corpse, trapped in a mammoth metal tomb at the bottom of the sea. They counted me among the scores of charred corpses that have, and forever will, wash upon the shore of foreign lands bearing our tainted insignia. They thought my person rendered unrecognizable and inhuman by the shells of the enemy. They could not find my body, but they thought me dead.
It is, after all, on the battlefield that a corpse is best lost in a crowd.
My father gripped the microphone with shaking hands and shed public tears for his least favorite son. My brothers, the same ones that tanned my hide so thoroughly in my youth, have collected dizzying sums in my name and swore vengeance against the enemy that they purported had dispatched me from this earth. My family mourned my death to great publicity and have skewed my character to fit their needs.
When I appeared haggard and broken and mad at the doorstep of our ancestral home, they did not recognize me. When I proved, without a shred of doubt, that I am of their blood they refused to recognize me. It wasn’t until I was dragged away by the authorities and forced for three days and nights into a windowless cell that my existence became an irrefutable legal fact.
I was hosed and shaved and dressed in a uniform which amplified my delirium to heights requiring tranquilizers. When my family met me again, they greeted me with tears of joy to the presence of all the local propagandists. I was given handshakes and hugs and commendations and medals, yet when I was handed a microphone and asked to speak on the subject of my survival the sound was cut short. I tried to express the horrors that I had seen at sea, to warn others who might follow my tracks — yet the state has no interest in the truth.
It never did.
My family thought me dead, and they were not completely wrong. While I was out there, stuck in that incomprehensible plane of dark blue, I lost a part of myself. A part of my soul was left behind in those frigid wastes of water and I am left as nothing but a mad shambling corpse. I may walk. I may breathe, and my wounds have fully healed, but they thought me dead and they were not completely wrong.
I write these words on my own accord. I write them as a testament to the horrors I had witnessed. I write them as a means of preserving the little sanity I have left — in the little time I have left. For when the sun rises and another day begins anew and they knock on my door, I shall dispatch myself with the letter opener that sits ready for me on the desk.
Of such gravity is the horror of my past. So maddening is the anguish of my present.
It is with the same ornate blade that I unsealed my military summons many months prior. Life had not been swell back then, and I had always thought of myself as a most persecuted character — yet that envelope I found sitting on my study wholly consumed my heart in a fit of tragedy.
I sunk down into my chair and did not move from the spot until I had emptied half my cigarette case. Eventually, I finally gathered the courage to bring the letter to my father in hopes that he would help me avoid its consequences. He was, after all, a man of great provincial power and he did, just a few short years prior, help me avoid my conscription with no fuss or argument. He even helped secure papers that I was trained in the administrative branch to ensure I would be kept away from the fighting if unfortunate circumstances were to occur.
I had walked into his study in the high hopes that he would label the summons a political provocation, or that he would perhaps call the local recruitment office on my behalf and threaten retribution for their summoning of his son.
He did no such thing.
Instead, he produced his spectacles, read through the document with great diligence and then, with a long sigh, as if he’d suffered a grave but manageable inconvenience, he said: ‘Maybe they’ll make a man of you yet.’
Throughout my life I have long suffered bouts of vertigo and panic, yet my body had never failed me before. No matter how anxious and overwhelmed my mind would get, my consciousness never departed. It wasn’t until I was left rubber kneed and speechless in my father’s study that I suffered true betrayal from within.
One moment, I was trying to stoke embers of empathy in the patriarch’s loveless eyes and the next I was lying in a dark room with a cold compress on my face.
I had fainted, my mother informed me, sitting on the side of my bed. My father had not been pleased with my hysterics and, in my mother’s eyes, I had indeed overreacted. She had read the summons herself while I was indisposed and found that I wasn’t being summoned to serve in the military. I was only asked to stop by the recruitment office for a health checkup. Surely, my mother thought, once the military men saw my frail build they would deem me unworthy of the army and I could return back home.
I knew her words, as always, were tainted with wine and naïve optimism, but I let those blind dreams of escape accompany me into a shallow dreamless sleep.
When I arrived at the enlistment office the following day whatever illusions I had about avoiding military service were quickly dispelled. I was to go to war, but I took some amount of comfort that — according to my conscription papers — I was only suited for administrative work.
That illusion too, however, was quickly brought to dissipate.
We were loaded onto a bus that would have been considered a relic in my childhood. A few of the men sang patriotic songs to pass the time, some drank and played cards in the back — most, as I, stared out of the window in defeated silence.
When we arrived at our new, less than favorable, lodgings, I tried arguing my case with the superiors. They were deaf to my pleas. I was to go where I was told to go and put up no debate.
My insistence at being put on administrative duties did nothing to sway those of higher rank, but they did serve as a source of great entertainment to the fellow mobilized.
For three days we stayed on improvised cots in an abandoned warehouse. There was no heating, the food was barely fit for dogs and the commanding officers treated us as belligerent children. My fellow soldiers, much like my brothers and cousins in the days of my youth, quickly discovered my powerless nature and took advantage of it. I was robbed, I was beaten and, on the third night in the foul-smelling warehouse, I woke to abhorrent threats to my bodily autonomy.
I believe these threats were never brought into fruition, but I am not certain. For when I woke from my troubled slumber and found the laughing brutes gathered around my cot my soul routed from my body and drove my mind to another fainting fit.
When, the following morning, I was urged onto another bus, I had hoped a change in my environs would bring my suffering to an end. It did not. After a drive which took us hungrily through the night, we were brought to a port and from that port ushered into a battle ship referred to as The Victorious.
I urged the commanding officer to check my documents. I invoked my father’s name so many times that the name lost all meaning and broke down into nothing but a collection of syllables. I argued and struggled against being brought onto the ship, yet my protests earned me nothing but violence.
Soon, with tears in my eyes and numbness in my knees, I watched the recognizable shore give way to an unending plane of dark blue.Standing there, gripping the railing, I was sure that I would meet my end at sea and never stand upon land again.
Undoubtedly, things would have been better that way. I would be happier dead and ignorant of the inconceivable wickedness that hides in the uncharted depths of the sea.
Of how long I spent aboard The Victorious I do not know. Prior to setting foot on the battleship, I had never been at sea and my stomach deeply disagreed with the constant swaying of my new environs. The men with which I shared the ship proved to be just as brutal as I had come to expect of the military and the food which was served made me pine for the gruel I had consumed at land.
Along with the sickness and cruelty I experienced aboard The Victorious there was also the terror of the enemy to contend with. Each day, from the sky, unmanned machines bearing munitions descended upon us. They were dispatched by our defenses, yet the strikes were not always instant and the mess hall carried many stories of weapons systems too sluggish to defend their crew if the assaults were to worsen.
The environs of fear and sickness and abuse forced my mind further and further for my body. I disassociated. At times I felt like an outside observer watching my life play out minute by minute, at times, I felt as if I had ceased to exist all together.
I had convinced myself that this was madness. I was sure that this was what it felt like to lose grip on one’s sanity. My time on The Victorious, however, would pale to the mental anguish lying in wait for me in the open seas.
It happened during the night and it happened quickly.
One moment I was standing by the railing watching the dark waters below and the next the world was consumed in the blazes of an inferno. The explosion had both robbed me of my hearing and balance. Before I could even register the shock of the blast my lungs were full of ice-cold sea water. Just as I managed to recover some semblance of awareness and control in my limbs, a second explosion rocked the night sky.
Something had dislodged itself from the ship, for I was driven deep under water by a force from above. It was here, once more, that I was sure my life would come to an end. I struggle to comprehend how I managed to propel my body out of that freezing baptism of death, but I did. Driven by sheer instincts and a will for survival I thought I had shed long ago, I pulled myself back to the surface.
Whilst I was submerged, one of the lifeboats on The Victorious was blown off or released. I did not ponder about how my means of survival were made available. Driven by sheer instinct and adrenaline I swam to the lifeboat and pulled myself aboard.
The climb strained my body greatly and the silent flickering madness on the deck above drained what little attention my frenzied mind was capable of perceiving. Yet, nearly capsizing the vessel, I managed to pull my body aboard.
For a brief moment I noticed a pair of boots and was without a doubt certain that I was not alone. Before I had a chance to communicate with my supposed comrade, however, I noted a streak of warmth on my frigid body.
Just below my ribcage, bloodying the dirty uniform I was given, protruded a pipe of jagged metal.
I had seen my own blood before, my brothers ensured of that, but I had never seen so much of it. The night was bright with flames, but each second, I gazed upon my wound stole away my sight.
Deaf and blind, my body delivered me to the abyss of unconsciousness.
When I came to, the sky was red with morning and The Victorious was nowhere to be seen. I was unsure whether the ship had sunk completely or whether the currents had carried me to some uncharted corner of the sea, yet my confusion about my whereabouts were quickly dispelled by a dire realization.
I was not sharing the lifeboat with a fellow sailor. My supposed comrade had been divorced of anything that existed above his ribcage. The sheer sight of broken bloody bone peeking out from where his chest would have been almost sent me into another fainting fit, yet, with great difficulty, I steeled myself.
With the corpse resting on the other side of the boat, I busied myself with checking for supplies. They were, to no surprise yet many tears — completely lackluster. The radio in the lifeboat could easily trace its lineage to the second world war and worked about as well as its veterans live. The box with the flare gun was completely cleaned out, the meager ration packs were hard as stone and the first aid kit was filled with fetid used bandages and rusted instruments.
I negotiated my will to survive with the horror sprawled out on the other side of the boat and pulled myself onto my stomach to face the sea. I had hoped to catch sight of land, or perhaps another vessel, yet all I was greeted with was a shivering plane of emptiness. From time to time, my body let out horrid ululations which I had no control over. The sounds were terrible and chilled me to my very core, but the fact that I had regained my hearing provided some respite from the burning pain in my side and grief in my heart.
When the sun set, however, I found myself wishing I was deaf once more.
It started off as quiet bursts of sound which could, reluctantly, be attributed to the movement of the waves rocking the boat. Yet, the longer I lay on my stomach, the darker the night grew, the less I found myself able to hold onto the falsehood which kept me sane.
The headless sailor on the other end of the boat — he was speaking to me.
His vocalizations held no message but that of panic. He did not speak in words, but rather in shouts and blabbers which held only the most obscure connection to the human tongue.
As the night carried on the boat, with no aid from my person, began to rock. The raving of the dead sailor was unbearable yet I could not bring myself to turn around. Instead, I let the swaying of the boat rock my exhausted body to sleep.
When the morning came, the headless corpse was silent. I knew, however, that my sanity could not bear a repetition of the night prior. With great difficulty and even greater disgust, I navigated myself to face the dead body of my comrade. His corpse was still mangled from the chest up and there was no conceivable explanation for the raving and rocking that had taken place in the darkness, yet I brought it upon myself to be rid of the cadaver.
Before I pushed the body overboard, in great anguish and between guttural dry heaves, I searched the sailor’s person. I had hoped for some sort of an identifying mark so that I would know who I had briefly shared the boat with, but instead I only found a half empty pack of cheap cigarettes. These I took and, once the corpse had been set to float in the dark waters, I partook in one of them.
I had no shelter from the sun and my wound had not improved. Yet, even with my lungs weak from a steadily encroaching fever, I found some semblance of pleasure in the burning tobacco. The cigarette satisfied a craving long ignored, but it also fended off the hunger pangs.
The water, although possessing a bitter metallic bite, was drinkable. The ration packs, however, brought back no memories of human food.
During my first day in the boat, hours later after I had disposed of the corpse, I attempted to eat. When my teeth could not bite through the solidified chunk of mystery, I even dipped it in the sea in an effort to soften it. Nothing worked. For two sunsets I attempted to find a way to consume the meager nutrition I was left with until, on the following morning, in a fit of delirium, I threw the ration packs into the sea.
Man underestimates the dependance his intellect has on the world of flesh. As my wound festered and the sun beat down on my face, I quickly became slave to frenzied visions beyond the realm of comprehension. During the night, even with the corpse shed well out of sight, I could still hear the manic raving of the faceless sailor. The boat still rocked back and forth as if I had been an overgrown bloody infant being forced to sleep by a vengeful parent. Above me, in a sky untainted by the shine of a civilized world, the starts watched me like a thousand curious eyes.
During the day, when I lay on my belly in hopes of forgetting about the sun, I found the most colorful of plump fish watching me from the water. They followed the motion of the boat, floating with their gills nearly peeking out of the water, watching me with their primitive eyeballs. I could shift in the boat as violently as I pleased, I could scream and sing and stomp — yet the fish never left. It is only once the thought of seizing one of them to fend off starvation hatched in the back of my head that they suddenly retreated into the dark depths.
When I had committed myself to catching one of them, the sea was clear. It wasn’t until my hope had faded long later that they once again appeared. Were the thought to catch them to arise again — they would retreat. Were I to reflect upon my sluggish diseased limbs and decide they were not fit to grasp a living thing — the fish would suddenly return.
As the days passed my delirium grew. I would often see other vessels on the sea, both of the enemy and those of my own. I screamed and hollered at the ships, regardless of the flag they flew, and demanded rescue or at least deliverance from my suffering. None of the vessels stopped. In the back of my fevered mind a quiet voice told me that the ships were mere phantasms and in my tired heart I knew it spoke true, yet I raged at each rejection all the same.
I elected to ration the cigarettes and only smoke once after each sunrise, but the amount of days I had spent stranded at sea is a mystery to me. The cigarette pack could not have contained more than ten, perhaps twelve, cigarettes. When, in my utter mind-flaying boredom, I counted the crushed filters I had set aside, I counted dozens, sometimes hundreds of spent cigarettes. The pack never seemed to grow anymore empty, but then, one day, it did.
My skin had grown deathly pale with tinges of yellow by then. I existed in a state of complete delirium tainted with the harrowing realization that my body should have died yet it was refusing to. There was only one cigarette left in the pack. With as much gusto as my shambling limbs allowed, I crushed the paper box and threw it as far as I could. Using the dead sailor’s lighter, I lit up the final bit of tobacco and resolved to, hopefully, expire along with it.
It is only with a couple of puffs that the violent rays of the sun relented. A blanket of cool thick fog descended around me and mingled with the impotent puffs of smoke I was leaving in my trace.
In the distance, hiding in the fog, I could see the faint outlines of land. I was nearly certain of them being just another fabulation of my rotten brain, yet out of caution, and perhaps a little hope, I found my free hand dipping into the water and paddling towards the mysterious silhouette.
The boat was far too heavy and I was far too weak to move it under regular circumstances, but somehow, as if the water itself was pushing me along, I made progress. Soon, I found the crushed cigarette pack floating off in the sea, yet next to it sat a glass bottle with a piece of parchment inside. I quickly retrieved the bottle, yet just as I grabbed it I saw another and another. The closer the boat drew to the landmass obscured by fog, the more numerous the bottles became.
Without a shred of rational thought, I took to swiping the bottles from the water, ripping out the corks with my aching teeth and trying to make sense of the parchments inside. I could not. The script used in the papers was wholly foreign to me and written with poor discipline. Even though the scrawls spread through the pages like written spiderwebs I still grabbed one bottle after another.
It is with the final bottle that I retrieved before touching land that I finally found a message I could read. The letters were bent in all different angles and the words were clearly written under an appreciable strain, yet it’s message was decipherable:
Beware Neptune, for he does not take kindly to the world of Men.
I scarcely had time to make sense of the words before my lifeboat hit land.
Or, more accurately, something resembling land. When the lifeboat first came to rest, I was certain that the shore of the cryptic island was covered in sand. The moment I pulled my drained body over the side of the boat, however, I found there to be no beach.
The ground beneath me was scaly and warm, as if I was resting on the skin of some mammoth sea beast. Slowly, ever so slowly, I could feel the ground shift beneath me, as if it were a slave to the breaths of some unseen monstrosity.
Yet, my confusion over my environs did not last for long. Out in the fog, peeking out of the curtain of cool smoke like bright seductive fingers — I saw fruit. The bounty only held the slightest resemblance to the crop man knows as the banana. They were curved and yellow and plump yet they hung off of thick vines of seaweed strewn about as if discarded by some careless giant.
I knew not of where this fruit came and the stinging pain in my stomach barred me of such foolish inquisitions. I was a man only in the broadest definition of the category. In truth, I was an animal freed from a cage of fever and starvation. I did not ask from whence the food came. I only crawled towards it and prayed it would bring me deliverance from my pain.
The fruit was soft and tasted unlike anything I could recall. It had the consistency of meat, shredded chicken to be exact, yet it tasted of an eerie mix of strawberries and fish. Though not particularly appetizing in the abstract sense, in my nigh-starvation the fruit forced painful tears of joy from my eyes. One after the other, I ripped the pungent crop off of the vines until I could eat no more.
Then, with my stomach ready to burst and the unfamiliar ground beneath me gently swaying, I slept. Whilst I was trapped at sea, I had many dreams which bled past the unconscious into the world of flesh and bone. The rocking of the boat, the babbling of the headless sailor, I could scarcely tell the difference between the realm of sleep and feverish waking. Long had I slept like this. Yet when I tasted of that strange fruit, when I slept on that scaly earth hidden in impenetrable fog I was wholly surrendered to the realm of Hypnos.
I dreamt deeply and I dreamt long.
I was a fish.
I had scarce awareness of once being a man, but I swam through dark waters and had fins and gills. At first, I traveled alone, with much anxiety about where I was meant to be going. But soon, from the corner of my slitted eye, I spotted a flash of colorful scales.
At first, the other fish bid me no attention. They swam in their direction and, to my relief, had no issue with my distant escort. I still did not know where I was traveling to but the fellow fish swimming ahead made me feel safer. Steadily, our flock increased. Both in body and spirit, we all grew closer. The slitted eyes around me no longer ignored my presence. They started into my primitive soul in understanding. The fellow fish even — in a way that would be discomforting to a sober man — smiled at me with their queer lips.
I, as a fish, smiled at them in return, finding comfort in the company and camaraderie. We travelled in good spirits through the water and grew ever larger as a crowd and then, when all one could see was fish — we started to descend deeper into the water. The temperature had dropped considerably and the darkness turned all notions of community to vague suggestion, yet our flock simply grew closer and bumped one into another to remind ourselves of company.
We traveled so in the darkness, until slowly, I sensed a faint light in the distance. Until then, I had been keeping pace with the rest of the fish, not getting in anyone’s way and travelling at the speed the pack required of me — yet when I noted the pale blue shine in the darkness, I found myself drawn to the front of the group.
I pushed my way past the other fish. They were not angry — on the contrary, in the steadily gaining light I could see them grin at me as friends. Their teeth were not those of fish, but rather reminiscent of humans. I knew their lips and dentures were wrong, but much time had passed since anything had looked on me with kindness. I smiled back and continued to push towards the front of the pack to get a better view of our destination.
As the source of light grew nearer, it’s outlines were starting to take shape. We were all swimming towards some sort of radiant gate which sat at the bottom of the sea. I was not the only fish that had sped up, the whole group had picked up in its speed. We were all drawn towards that magnificent light yet there was no animosity, each fish swam as quickly as it could knowing that no one would be left behind.
I reached the front of the flock and then even further. Even though somewhere in the back of my primitive skull I knew that I had once been a man, I swam further than all the other fish. The water around me grew pleasantly warm and the touch of the light felt cosmically correct on my scaly face.
I was very near to the celestial gate to which my primitive mind drove me when I noticed something was floating ahead. At first I thought it a piece of driftwood long sunk, or perhaps a bushel of seaweed, yet the nearer I drew, the slower my fins moved.
Before me, floating in the water, sat a blood drained sailor divorced of his body at his abdomen. With his one arm, he furiously pumped his fist and, with his thin bloodless lips, he screamed in a silent frenzy.
As a fish, I could not hear him. Yet I was sure that it was the same headless sailor that had shared my floating cage with me. A sudden terror washed through my cold-blooded flesh. In an instant I desired to change my direction and move away from the burning ethereal light.
My passage, however, was blocked with a wave of fish.
I desperately struggled against their smiling onslaught, but on a tide of bodies I found myself being pushed closer to the gate. The heat of the water became unbearable. The one-armed sailor grasped me in his hand. He squeezed and I breathed in water.
I woke human to a dark night, dripping wet, coughing up salt water.
In my shock of having appendages once more, I jumped to my feet. It wasn’t until I was bent over trying to rid my chest of whatever sea water was left in it that I realized that I was once again capable of standing. The festering wound in my side, in fact, was no more. What was left of the shrapnel which harmed me dropped impotently at my feet.
Before I could celebrate the return of my meager health, however, the moon stole my attention. It burnt bright in the sky and looked much larger than before. There was a horrid feeling in the back of my exhausted mind that it was no longer a celestial body but a living thing. I stared up at the moon until, in a terrible rotation which chilled my heart, it looked back at me.
The moon was a giant fish eye and it was staring straight at me.
Before I could make full sense of the horror in the sky, the scaly ground beneath my feet started to shift once more. This time, the movements of the isle were not of gentle breaths, they were shudders and pushes and shakes.
The fish-eye in the sky stared at me and I became certain that the island was trying to get rid of me. Not wanting to be thrown into the water to be at the mercy of what dwells within, I quickly retreated back to my lifeboat.
Around the lifeboat, much like in those starving days I had spent at sea, a school of brightly colored fish sat with their mouths above the water, watching me. Some smiled their grins of human teeth, others raved in the familiar tones of the headless sailor — yet I had little mind to pay attention to them. The movements of the isle stole away all my attention and sanity.
Just as I set my feet onto the life boat, the mass of scaly flesh behind me rose out of the water. With the sudden vacuum, the water was set wild and I barely prevented myself from falling into the raging depths. I held on to whatever I could, hoping that staying afloat would spare my life.
One look above, however, drew my hands numb.
Words do not exist to explain what I saw. I can only say that the being of tentacles and eyes and claws that rose out of the sea was nothing which man, or God, should ever commune with. I tried to avert my eyes from the beast but my body had lost all will to move. In utter paralysis I stared up at the abomination above. I watched the many eyes of the horrid Neptune and they watched me in return.
They watched me and slowly, far too slowly, my consciousness retreated in a faint.
I woke up in an overcrowded hospital on the mainland. No information was given to me about where I was found or what my state was. When I was proven to be lucid, I was vacated from my bed and sent off to the street. I tried to regain entry into the building, to find answers to what I had seen or — at least — to find forgetfulness in medication.
It was the elderly security guard of the hospital who intercepted me and who I tried to detail my misfortune to. I told him of the battleship and of the lifeboat and of the headless sailor and horrid living island. He believed none of my words, yet, he took pity on me. From his pocket he gave me meager change and suggested that if I am who I claim to be I should take the bus back home.
So, I did. With my mind gripped with confusion and the aftershocks of frenzied fever, I traveled back home to the family that thought me dead. They rejected me at first but, once it became clear beyond the shadow of a doubt that I am of their blood, they accepted me in open, public embrace.
On the first night that I spent back in the manor, my mother sat by my bed and with wine on her breath told me how she worried for me and how she would never let me be taken to war again. Only a few days later, however, my father woke me in the presence of a uniformed man with scattered metal on his chest.
My survival had been most fortuitous, the military man said as my father proudly held vigil at my bedside, yet my service to the motherland was not done. I was to be promoted and recognized for my heroic survival. I was to be given control over a vessel. The mere sight of the uniform made my nerves unmanageable, but I did not break into madness until I heard the name of the ship which I was to command.
The Neptune.
The time of my departure draws at hand and soon they will knock on my door. I have smoked my final cigarette and committed all that I could to paper. There is not much left for me to do but to grab that ornate letter opener and ensure that I never see the sea again.
Beware Neptune, for he does not take kindly to the world of men.