… join the adventure …

just a few hours following several recent strange encounters. Was that really a talking giraffe in the scullery, and was anything about his story the slightest bit believable? (Seriously, why would someone hire a giraffe to kill Manute Bol? Hope you didn’t miss either that or the strange road trip to San Diego.) You’ve tried to get some sleep but you’re used to reading yourself to sleep, and the book you brought along is lost.

You’d barely started it on the train ride, a little paperback that you found wedged between seats in the quiet car, no owner in sight. An odd story about early space explorations, two men shot up into the dark sky in impossibly small quarters. What would it be like to be so close to another, and for so long. It sounds awful yet also comforting. Not much worse than now, as you lay hammocked in these dark belowdecks, listlessly chewing a slice of dried apple. Other sailors sleep, the air is yeasty, cavelike, and you are all the suspended bats.

Nevermind your lost novel. What is going on here, on this strange ship. The Captain is a weirdo, that’s for sure. Maybe he took your book. Or that giraffe. And something odd is definitely happening with the guarded quarters in the aft. A mystery is afoot, a plot threading this ship, a plot that you’ve fallen into haphazardly, not knowing the true beginining–and certainly not the end. Oh well. Is it better to be caught in plot, a cork bobbing in dark seas, or to be the designer of the story, building each doorway, setting, and scene?

Not that you have a real choice here. This tough apple doesn’t help, but it’s all you got. You don’t know the last time you ate. It’s long been a flaw of yours, your mother would often chide you for forgetting meals. Your father, too, though less with words than sighs of remonstration.

How much he wanted you to stay, for you to spend your life working the dull family business. Or maybe in truth he was afraid you’d follow in his footsteps; maybe he wanted you to go, maybe he, too, once felt the same restlessness that has led you to this place, overwhelmed by society, affronted, wearied, agitated. That need for something else. The unknown. For each moment to be new. To matter.

In your early years, before he was confined by his condition, your father was far more active in society. Those strange parties your parents took you to, how you’d wander away in the middle of dull festivities, but where did they take place, how far away these parties, on what strange estates in what hidden woods? The hushed conversations, those men with what had to be false names. Gee-org. Wabla. Meieumay. No one real ever had such names, just those odd people, those odd parties. You remember within one such house a wondrous library with objects of unknown provenance, not just books dizzying with languages and letters you couldn’t fathom but masks on the walls, too, and games and weapons hanging like a menagerie of the world’s darkest outposts, a stark witness to the surreal. You always wanted to sneak a book from that library. Who wouldn’t? But you were always too afraid. (Chicken. You chicken. So said, you remember now, that other in the backseat, on the beach, the hands around your neck: that other voice there with you all the time: that other face you still can’t see: the skeptic: the punisher: the sibling: the brother. Or was it just the self along? The doubt within, given horrible form?)

You chew the awful apple. The ship shifts with a new wind, the bulwarks groan, the hammock sways. Chew, chew. Throughout your life you have seen your father’s grim countenance in the faces of other men. That man you passed in the town, the man in the office, he had a certain likeness. The Captain—something about the eyes. Sometimes it’s as if your father has come back to keep everwatch on you, you think, wondering if being so haunted is good or bad, what is the impact of love, and as if in answers at midships a round ball of iron tears through the hull. You spin off your hammock. The ball has torn through the body of a sleeping sailor: a leg falls from a hammock, followed by a wet slap of blood.

At first follows silence.

Then the attack begins.