We Float Upon a Painted Sea (20 page)

Andrew’s bottom lip started to tremble in fear. He could only make out white open eyes in the darkness, when Bull’s head tipped back.

“Him?” said Andrew, trying to swallow the lump in his throat that threatened to choke him. Bull’s eyelids started to close over. His speech was now ponderous and malevolent. He mumbled,

“The Walker has crossed the ninth wave. He’s coming for a mortal. You can’t escape him. Once he’s left the Otherworld and crossed the ninth wave, he will find you. There is no flight. The Walker is abroad. The Walker is abroad.” Andrew shivered. He pulled the collar of his shirt up to cover his neck and said,

“The Otherworld? The Ninth Wave? How do you know about that?” Andrew drew his head closer as if trying to collect the last few garbled words from a dying man, but Bull had fallen back to sleep. Andrew normally dismissed ancient myths as superstition and the antithesis of the Presbyterian upbringing that had been bestowed upon him. He consoled himself that his church spoke of a vengeful God, but also a forgiving one. He had always believed in spiritual salvation in the afterlife, but he could not marry the beguiling concept of his soul existing in a celestial eternity, with the philosophy of the paranormal. He had been brought up by his father to dismiss such mystical notions as superstitious nonsense, and challenge his grandmother’s fables, but there always remained a residual doubt.

Andrew sat in silence, wondering if it was by chance or design that Bull also knew of this legend. He was overcome with an unearthly, disturbing feeling. He became infected with a sensation that someone or something was staring at him from out in the sea and now from inside the raft. Once more he wished he had put the canopy up before the darkness settled. He became aware of the sound and sensation of his heart pounding in his chest. His lips were dry and blistered from the constant exposure to the salt laden ocean winds, and his ears were attentive to every sound around him. Andrew could stand the withering thirst no longer. He had left the fresh water by Bull’s side. In the pitch darkness he stretched out a groping hand to clutch the rain catch but as he did he felt the soft wet fur of Bull’s discarded coat. Impulsively he jumped back in alarm. He fought off the emerging voices from his head. His hands crept out once more. He located the water bladder and snatched it to his chest. He took tiny sips, stopping only to peer towards the sea. He whispered out loud,

“Get a grip of yourself man.” A voice came forth from the dark.

“You shouldn’t be scared.” Fear now gripped Andrew like a sharp winter frost, chilling him to the bone. This wasn’t Bull’s voice. Towards the aperture appeared the figure of a man resting against the damaged pontoon. “Who or what type of demon are you,” stammered Andrew.

“What a strange question to ask,” replied the figure. “Do you like asking questions? I do. I have a few questions for you.”

“What questions?”

“Like where is this place?”

“I don’t know what you mean. It’s a raft. We’re floating on the sea.”

“A painted sea?”

“What?” A prolonged moment of silence came and went. Andrew pressed his back as far into the pontoon as the pressure would allow. Finally, he said, “Look, go away.” Andrew heard a baleful laugh and then the figure said,

“Look you say? I would look but, I – cannot - see. I was asleep and now I – cannot – see! Who are you voice in the dark?”

For a fleeting moment the darkness seemed to lift. The clouds had parted once more and there was the comforting sight of a full moon. Andrew took his opportunity to locate the flares. His hand grasped one. It was still wet, but immediately he pulled the ripcord and fired it off into the night sky. He turned to view the exposed figure, but the illumination filled him with new dread. The figure had vanished but his eyes became transfixed towards the black ocean. More bleak thoughts circled in his mind. No previous experience had prepared him for the sight which unfolded in front of his eyes. Dark shapes surrounded the raft – tall and hooded, moving in the darkness amongst the waves. He was overcome with a feeling of spiralling dismay and foreboding. The raft drifted silently. He shut his eyes, hoping that when he reopened them, the malignant inventions would have vanished like the figure in the darkness. The waxing moon illuminated obelisk shaped objects out in the sea, emerging on the surface of the water, circling the raft and then disappearing again. The wind whistled as it passed over the raft, creating vortexes of air that swirled around him, turning the vessel like a carousel at a funfair, and with every turn of the raft, the objects appeared nearer. He felt as if he was stumbling down a pitch black spiral staircase, trembling hands stretched out in blind fear.

Andrew wiped his eyes and when he was able to focus, in every direction, there were black, hooded forms. Strangest of all, amongst the host was a white shrouded figure, its black companions appearing to rally around, as if protecting it.  “Their leader
,
” thought Andrew. He felt like his eyes were conspiring with his imagination to deceive and to torture his nervous system. The clouds returned and the shapes began to fade, but Andrew struggled to stay in control of his imagination. To his horror, a large splash sounded close to the raft. Andrew stiffened. He considered that perhaps Bull or Malcolm had fallen overboard, worse still, taken by one of the hooded forms. He could see only darkness. He was awash with negative emotions. He felt trapped by the sea; it was his jailer - unwilling to let him go and every new day, it devised new ways to torture him, to make him lose his mind. He imagined floating in a cage with preternatural cellmates.

Andrew was rigid with fear. A growling noise sounded from inside the raft. His eyes remained focused on the spot where Bull lay sleeping, but he couldn’t be sure of anything. He imagined a creature, breathing heavily and curled up only inches from his feet. He convinced himself that he could detect a pungent, animal odour, like wet fur. He pulled his legs up slowly. For an instant, he drew his eyes to the surface of the pulsating black mass that by day, he recognised as the sea. Nothing appeared as it should be anymore. The group of shrouded figures circled the raft in a harmonious dance. The overwhelming feeling, that several thousand metres of sea water beneath their flimsy vessel, expedited his dread. Until now, he hadn’t really contemplated the cold depth and darkness of the ocean; it had been just another substance to travel on. He thought of all the strange contorted creatures that existed at pressures unbearable to man. He thought of the water in the oceanic trenches, unaffected by the motion of the waves above, and remaining stagnant for thousands of years like a maritime soup.

The initial elation of avoiding death when he survived the sinking of the ship, and the shark attack the previous night, was a distant memory. A gastric rock of fear continued to rise up inside his gut. Andrew’s brain battled to make sense of the situation and stay in control against an incoming tide of despair. He entertained an erroneous image of him being swarmed by the figments of his own hallucinations, unable to stave off the frenzied attack and being dragged down to the extremity of the deep green sea. He yearned for any object with no association with the sea. He thought of trees and mountains but in his mind the trees in his mind turned to flotsam and the mountains into foam crested waves. The imminence of insanity was falling upon him. He visualised happier times, moments of joy shared in the first few months after meeting Ashley. A serene moment, holding her hand as they attended a Jan Fabre exhibition at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery called the
Blue Hour.
The relief was brief. He recalled the inspiration behind the art forms – the
blue hour
was a moment of residual light, circling around the time which exists somewhere between light and dark - what artists call the
sweet light
as it spilled across the earth, and what the Celts believed was the opening of a gate to the
Otherworld.
Was the visitation from a supernatural realm, he thought.

He recalled how his Grandmother had described the
ninth wave
, a mystical barrier which divides the lands of the mortals from the land of the dead, of how it lay somewhere between the ocean and the Isles of Paradise, where suffering and contempt are absent and how these were lands inhabited by immortal beings. Between dusk and dawn an immortal would come forth and return with a soul. The awful possibility occurred to him, that Bull may have experienced a premonition? Was “
The Walker
” his visitation? Had he come for him? Was this the end and now was the time for his redemption? Were they already dead and this was some form of Purgatory? Andrew wrestled with his galloping psychosis. He even wondered if he had already crossed over the
ninth wave
into the
Otherworld
. Ashley’s voice raced through his brain like a herd of wild horses to save him from the brink.
Oh don’t be so ridiculous, would you listen to yourself man. Have you gone quite mad? There is no such thing as an Otherworld or spirits crossing from other dimensions
. Andrew’s Mother now joined in the discussion.
Poppycock, balderdash and country bumpkin talk! Only a fool would listen to your grandmother’s fairy tales. For once I have to agree with the skinny chain smoking bitch. You are barking mad my boy if you believe in such nonsense...

The hooded shapes maintained their distance, but always with the white shrouded figure in the middle. He imagined the safety of home in a fruitless attempt to counteract his conscious nightmare. If only he could get one last chance to make his life good, he thought. He would beg Ashley’s forgiveness for acting like a maniac, he would kiss his children’s foreheads one last time, smell their sweet skin and cradle them in his arms. If only God would take pity on him, show him divine mercy by allowing him one last chance to put things in his life right.

All night he stayed awake, watching his breath condense before him and staring back and forth from the sea to the far side of the raft where he wanted to believe Bull lay sleeping. He waited for his assailants to end their tormenting game and finally attack en masse, but curiously they kept their distance. He passed the hours praying for the sun to rise, even to see the diurnal illumination of twilight and to stare into a liminal world. The gates to the
Otherworld
would close and his life would be spared. Only signs of daylight on the horizon would bring him some comfort now. Andrew cursed Bull and castigated himself for waking him from his nightmare. He denigrated his grandmother’s superstitions, and then he began to feel sick. His mind was beginning to ferment in new depths of paranoia, twisting interminably with fresh inventions to explain away the images in front of him. He cursed the manufacturers of the raft for not properly securing the emergency pack, for not making the pontoons resistant to being punctured by a sharp multi-tool and for not making the satellite responder more robust. He cursed them for not providing rations, for surely the lack of food was driving this hallucination. He wondered if he could send a letter of complaint to them from the Otherworld.

Later, he became conscious of the changing colour of the sky, now holding some of the diffracted light from the other side of the planet. The blackness dissolved and faded to a grey, and the sun poured its red light onto the seascape. He watched as the warm glow cast off the darkness and spread out on the emerging horizon. He concentrated his listless eyes on the shapes, refusing to disappear back to their
Otherworld
. The light increased by the second and Andrew found that his mystical apparitions were a pod of killer whales. Andrew sighed, “Oh thank God, thank you God,” he said. The reprieve was short lived. Andrew now faced a more rational, earthly fear as he contemplated the prospect of the whales ramming against the raft. He looked towards where Bull lay, curled up sleeping in his white, faux fur coat and foil blanket, still snoring like a hibernating bear. He was, for the first time, glad to see his face. Malcolm still lay motionless like a crash-test dummy, but at least he was still alive. The pod of whales continued to swim only metres from the raft. It was obvious to Andrew that the shrouded figures had been the shapes of their large dorsal fins rising in and out of the water. In the middle of the pod there was one white fin. Andrew stared in disbelief. His mouth was cast wide open, aghast at the sight of an abomination of nature, he thought. He wondered if his eyes were still playing tricks on him, but as Bull awoke and joined him on his side of the raft, he too could see the white orca.  “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost mate,” said Bull.

“It feels like I have. It’s a pod of whales. They’ve been following the raft all night. Do you see that one in the middle of them? The white one. I’ve been staring at it all night.”

“Is that your ghost? A ghost orca, that’s an interesting thought. Perhaps the other whales don’t even realise that it travels with them? Perhaps the ghost whale doesn’t even know it is dead, itself.”

“It’s been a long night. I’m in no mood for your banter.”

“Well you would insist in leaving the canopy down and staring at the sea. Seriously, that will be that albino killer whale that’s been in the news lately. It’s been spotted a few times but some marine scientists say it’s not possible, but it clearly is. Shows you what they know.” Andrew’s nerves were still raw and on edge. He said,