What Lot's Wife Saw (42 page)

The Priest and the Doctor exchanged glances. Montenegro agreed to come but said that I should refrain from having hysterics if all we found in the ninth cove was sand and salt fumes. The Doctor grudgingly gave in, saying that he was just coming to make sure I didn’t fall down some crevasse since he had no free beds in the orthopaedic ward.

We started to walk along the shore but found the going laborious as our legs sank into the sand. In the absence of any wind, the sea was even more off-putting, more unnatural than in the port. Violet, viscous, torpid, it was like opaque glass that’d been spread over the sand in thick tongues which invaded the shoreline, forming rounded inlets into the desert. One could imagine lifting the water like a rubber mat and revealing dry sand underneath. We struggled up and down the low dunes, ticking off the inlets as we advanced.

At the fifth, the Doctor grumbled that we should have brought water with us. He suggested that we turned back to get some and come out again. I admonished him, saying that it was supplies of courage he needed rather than water. The Priest grabbed the Doctor’s sleeve as an insurance policy against wasting more time. Reaching the crest of the penultimate ridge we beheld the highest dune we had yet seen. The ninth cove lay hidden behind it, harbouring the proof that when I see a Black Ship, there bloody well is one. I made a silent plea that I was right as I crossed the eighth cove and started up the slope.

“I’m not going anywhere,” the Doctor stated. He sat down on his haunches and declared that he wouldn’t climb the sand ridge to see something that didn’t exist or, even worse, something that
did
exist. He had just come to the conclusion that he’d rather remain healthily in doubt than find the Black Ship and never sleep again.

The Priest stared at him, looking troubled. He came back down the slope but not before he’d reached out and gripped my redingote to bring me down as well. I accused them that their cowardice was holding them hostage.

The Doctor voiced his reservations. “If the Black Ship is playing mind games with us, then the biggest mistake we could make would be to climb this slope and see it on the other side. To confirm that it exists.”

“Why, Goddamn you?”

“Because that would lead us to the insane conclusion that we six see something that exists but that no one else can see!”

The Priest grimaced in mounting fear. He agreed that to see something that didn’t exist was less alarming than seeing something real that was invisible to others. Mass delusion is a recorded phenomenon – science can tackle it, but science balks at allowing six people to see real ships when no one else can.

“I say we turn back! We have been utterly reckless to even have come so close, to the foot of this dune,” the Doctor said.

“If you climb just a few metres, Fabrizio, you might find some important answers.”

“It won’t answer any of the questions that plague me, Siccouane, apart, perhaps, from the only one that I’m not at risk from!”

“And you prefer to believe that you just imagined the Black Ship?”

“Yes, I prefer to believe that I imagined it. I’d prefer that a thousand times over and I’d never have questioned it had you not dragged me out here today.”

He stubbornly folded his arms and declared that he wouldn’t take another step if I couldn’t convince him why he should abandon the comforting theory of mass delusion and replace it with a complex existential conundrum too large for his brain.

“Why not start with finding out where reality ends and fantasy begins, Fabrizio?”

The Doctor erupted in exasperation. “You make me laugh, Siccouane! Whatever you do, don’t make me laugh! The boundaries between fact and fiction have been shifting violently over the past few days, to the extent that I have begun to believe that they don’t exist. Fantasy can be an extrapolation of the truth and reality a more understandable version of hallucination. No one can force me to ascend that ridge and compound my confusion. If, at a thousand-to-one, the Black Ship is berthed in that inlet, I will go insane!”

I pointed at the paltry obstacle facing us and said that it seemed pathetic that three middle-aged blokes were debating whether or not to climb it. Fabrizio slapped his palm on the sand and said that if by climbing it we were forced to totally change our understanding of the world, then yonder dune was higher than the Himalayas and far more dangerous. All this time, Montenegro’s contribution was to desperately leaf through his Bible and complain that our jabbering was stopping him from thinking. He monotonously repeated his conclusions.

“If we don’t find that ship behind the dune, it means that what we saw that afternoon from the terrace was a product of our imagination. If, however, we see it lying there, we can at least conclude that our logic and our senses haven’t failed us. That would automatically mean that real objects we see are, for some reason, not visible to anyone else. Although mass delusions exist in the scientific textbooks, reality being seen only by the few doesn’t.”

“Exactly! Show me one book where it mentions, examines or explains such a phenomenon,” Fabrizio shouted.

“This is the only one,” said Montenegro, holding up his Bible.

He placed it on the sand and looked at it thoughtfully. Religion mentions supernatural phenomena it presents as real, visible only to the enlightened or the damned, but I hadn’t considered that we belonged to one of these two categories – until now. The Priest was fully aware that he was leading the conversation along dangerous pathways that even he couldn’t handle.

“The more we talk about it, the worse it becomes. Let’s turn back while there’s still time,” begged the Doctor.

If I abandoned the quest now, I could never abide myself in the future. I’d have earned the contempt that I heap upon others and I’d become a stranger in my own body. Of course, if I were to see the Black Ship again, I’d be treading in a territory of frightening solitude. My suspicion that there was an insurmountable wall between myself and others would no longer be just suspicion.

From two evils, I choose the one that is closest to my nature, so I declared that I was determined to scale the dune. I understood their desire to turn back and I promised that whatever I found in that inlet, I’d keep to myself. The Doctor was correct, I had no right to force them into dangerous territory against their reason, but, for my part, the horror of my doubts was worse than anything that awaited me beyond the ridge.

Silence reigned. The Priest plunged his fingers thoughtfully into the sand and finally muttered to Fabrizio that it was far too late to turn back now.

“Of course it’s too late,” whimpered the Doctor. “We never should have come here at all, never should have reached the last obstacle and said what we’ve said, especially what Siccouane’s said. You leave me no choice but the one that I’d never have accepted. I hate you!”

He got to his feet, sniffling, and complained that he should have known that the Secretary would have dragged him down a one-way path. Why wouldn’t he ever learn from his mistakes, since every day that dawned was worse than the previous one and the only way to stay out of trouble was to stand perfectly still, like a statue, and shut down his brain – how dare we force him to think!

He glowered up at the ridge. He demanded that we at least shut up and stop voicing our thoughts in his direction. We promised to stay silent. He also stipulated that we advanced abreast and not in single file so that whatever awaited us in the inlet would be seen by all simultaneously so that no one of us would influence another. We were not even to look at each other. We agreed to that as well. We calculated that it would take twenty paces to reach the top and agreed to stretch that to twenty-five so I with my short legs wouldn’t struggle nor would the Doctor with his extra weight. We lined up and started at a steady pace so that we could crest the ridge at the same time. Holding our breaths we took our last step and our heads cleared the top.

Our eyes were first greeted by three masts that pointed straight to the sky like swords. Then black sails, neatly furled and secured along the spars. Then the hull appeared gleaming black in the sun as if freshly varnished. Fabrizio inconsolably crossed himself.

The ship seemed empty of crew and far more beautiful than we had imagined when we’d seen it from afar, from the Palace terrace. It had the appearance of a frigate of old but it looked spanking new as if just built. A few metres from the water, it had been raised up on wooden cribbing which supported it on the sand. There was no sign of the equipment that must have been used to haul her from the water: no rails, cranes, winches or pulleys, nothing. There were no traces on the sand, either, no prepared slipway nor any drag marks, as if the vessel had leapt out of the sea and trapped itself in the cribbing. There was an eerie, complete lack of human presence. We strained our ears to pick up any sound but, since there was no wind, all we heard was our panting.

“I’m going down for a closer look,” I whispered.

Fabrizio desperately shook his head and grabbed at my clothes to stop me but I managed to wriggle free. I started down the slope. I tripped and went head over heels and ended up in a heap at the bottom. I managed to arrest my tumbling just before my head cracked on one of the wooden stays. I looked up at the imposing black hull that reared into the sky and blocked out the sun.
Calm now, Nicodeme
, I advised myself.
This is what you’ve been waiting for, to be right next to it and knock on its timbers, smell the steel of its anchor and make sure you don’t see ghosts
. I motioned to the other two to join me.

The Priest gave the Doctor a hefty shove and the latter imitated my speedy descent to the bottom. Montenegro tobogganed down the slope. They both landed next to me.

The Priest whispered that it looked totally proper, nothing metaphysical about it at all. It seemed outdated but brand new. The keel was perfectly clean, no barnacle, seaweed or scum marred it, as if it had never been at sea. He reached out and ran his hand below the waterline; everything shone as though freshly painted. Fabrizio pulled the Priest’s hand away saying that it was wiser not to touch it. The Priest continued to admire its trim lines and inhaled the warm smell of wood and paint that it gave off. He mused that nothing so beautiful could be the work of the Devil.

“Don’t touch it, Montenegro,” the Doctor pleaded in a strangled voice, “it might be beautiful, but it really shouldn’t be here with that tapered prow that is obviously designed to sail through a normal sea. And look how she is resting. Someone must have hauled her onto the sand and steadied her with wooden supports. Someone must also have gathered the sails and wrapped them around the yards. That someone might still be here observing us.”

We instinctively looked right and left but the whole cove seemed deserted. We walked all around the ship and examined it from all sides, we measured its length in paces and we pushed the rudder back and forth. Its keel seemed to be extraordinarily heavy, it must have given it remarkable stability as it cut through the water. We couldn’t tell that much about the sails since they were furled but from the complexity of the rigging and the number of ropes that descended from the masts and enveloped the deck in a cobweb, we guessed that it had an inordinate amount of canvas, as if this vessel could never get its fill of wind. The prow, with its elegant upturn, seemed ready to sail for the stars if freed from the cribbing. The bowsprit was supported underneath by the carved head of a mermaid, whose eyes were open.

We gathered around its side and tried to make out the ship’s name. The letters had been roughly designed without the help of stencils and the handwriting was so shaky that it recalled the one we see in the infamous Consortium poster: “What did Lot’s wife see?” Seeing writing so vividly reminiscent next to the wide-open eyes of the mermaid, the question of the logo leapt to mind but it was immediately obvious that this was very different. It was comprised of seven letters, or at least that was as many as we could make out, although the erosive damp of the inlet might perhaps have erased some more. The Priest produced his Bible and jotted down as many as we managed to make out: IEREMOI.

The word meant nothing to us and the characters could have belonged to any of a number of Latin-based languages of the world. Fabrizio said that in Italian IERI meant “yesterday”, if that might help, and I said that in French MOI meant “me” but the Priest said he was convinced that the word must have a Greek root. He promised to look it up in his dictionaries and grammar books and tell us the next day.

“Can we go now? I can’t stand being next to an aberration of nature any longer,” the Doctor said in anguish.

I begged him to relax a bit and allow himself to become more acquainted with what he saw and touched. For a start, it was a beautiful ship. I asked the Priest to put me on his shoulders, hoping to be able to pull myself up onto the deck and explore inside.

Fabrizio went pale and implored us not to climb aboard.

“But can’t you see, Fabrizio, that the closer we get the less frightening it seems? We’re becoming familiar with it, we’re subjugating it, we’re cutting it down to our size. If we don’t walk on its decks and below deck we’ll never totally banish our fear of it.”

“You think you’re so clever, don’t you, Siccouane?”

“No, but I’m so desperate that I don’t have anything to lose. Father, please, can you lift me up to see if I can clamber on to the deck?”

Montenegro bent down, let me straddle his neck and, levering himself up on a support, lifted me as well. I couldn’t reach the deck but I could reach the top of the cribbing. I precariously climbed onto it and made sure of my footing before grabbing a shroud that was fixed to a shelf on the outer side of the gunwale. I managed to struggle onto the shelf. The deck was now very close. Stretching out my hand I managed to grasp the edge of it. My fingers clasped a depression like a groove. It might have been part of the scuppers, which were used for drainage of sea or rainwater. It was moist. I brought my fingertip to my nose and, it might have been wishful thinking, but I’d swear that I smelt the healthy tang of salt water from the open, blue sea. A long-forgotten fragrance, one that I’d believed would never again grace my nostrils. With a great effort I managed to swing myself up. I alighted on the deck and I heard the pleasant sound of my soles on the wooden boards. I leant over and caressed the planking. Exquisite wood. This vessel was incomparable.