Chapter One: The Storm

“Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for

An acre of barren ground…”

-Gonzalo, The Tempest

            The vacation had been going pretty well up to that point. The Caribbean was as beautiful as ever, the yacht Michelle was comfortable and well-stocked with good food, and the weather had cooperated. As a matter of fact, Hendricks’s biggest complaint up until today was that the only other passenger was a man.  

            Now, though, the weather wasn’t cooperating. At all. Dark grey clouds hung overhead and the wind was blowing faster every minute. In the distance, the sky was an ominous purple.

            Hendricks – only his family members called him by his first name, Lenny – had spent a lot of time around the sea, first at home in Massachusetts and then more recently in Miami. As far as he knew, not once in his twenty-nine years had he ever been more than ten miles from it. He had seen every kind of weather from light drizzles to hurricanes. Standing in the bow and looking at the sky, he could tell immediately that they were in for a bad time.

            “It looks like we might be in for a bad time.”

            Hendricks jumped as his fellow passenger, Ralph Zanator, suddenly appeared at his side. Ralph was a huge man; tall and rotund, with a great black beard. He always seemed to wear the same crisp white suit and Panama hat and he always spoke as though he were under the impression that everyone else was slightly deaf. This made his uncanny ability to appear without warning even more alarming.

            “Yeah,” said Hendricks, recovering himself. “Sure looks like it.”

            “Should be a good show,” boomed Ralph eagerly. “I do love a good storm, don’t you?”

            “Er…”

            Hendricks not only didn’t love a good storm, but he couldn’t conceive what a ‘good’ storm might look like, especially on a small yacht in the middle of the sea. The older man, however, appeared to take his uncertainty for enthusiastic agreement.

            “Exactly! What could be more dramatic than the eternal battle of the elements; air pitted against water; the sky against the sea! And us caught in the middle! Should be fun, eh?”

            “Er….”

            “That’s the spirit! I just hope the captain doesn’t make us all hide below decks and miss the show. But we probably can talk him out of that, what?”

            “I don’t think that’s a good…”

            “Precisely! I’ll speak to him at once!”

            “No, you really don’t have to…”

            It was too late; Ralph had already bounded away happily towards the bridge. Hendricks followed, gloomily.

            Ralph really was the strangest man Hendricks had ever encountered. The moment they met on the pier while they were waiting for the boat, Ralph had enthusiastically acted as though he and Hendricks were old friends who hadn’t seen each other in ages, and ever since he had been popping up at odd times to make some bizarre observance. When they passed a tiny archipelago, for instance, Ralph began to expostulate on the many advantages of living there, including spacious under-water caves and “all the shellfish a man could eat.” When they had gone fishing, Ralph had told them all sorts of extravagant and patently false fish stories, including one time that he had caught a “whopper” when it tried to eat a friend of his (“skinny fellow; I think it might have managed him had we given it the chance”).

            He also claimed to have been an Army Medic, which Hendricks wouldn’t have believed except that the captain, a former Marine named Bob Hogan, did. And it was Captain Hogan – a burly man in his mid-thirties with an impressively bushy blond mustache – who was speaking when Hendricks finally slouched onto the bridge.

            “It’s good to see a man with some guts,” said Hogan. “Especially these days, but you’ve gotta consider my position, Ralph. I mean, what happens to me if one of you dies and I get sued?”

            “Oh, you don’t have to worry about that!” Ralph said, waving a gigantic hand dangerously close to Lucas, the helmsman. “I assure you that we shall all be perfectly safe. We all have some nautical experience after all, and we know how to ride a storm, don’t we Mr. Hendricks?”

            “Uh, well…I guess, but…”

            “You see? Nothing at all to worry about!”

            “I’m not doubting your experience,” said Hogan. “But you know as well as I do that all the experience in the world can’t stop you from being swept overboard.”

            “Not if you’re wandering the deck,” said Ralph. “But simply remaining somewhere in the middeck, perhaps bound to the mast, should surely give us as much safety as could reasonably be expected, yes?”

            “Crazy kind of man…” Lucas muttered, glancing back over his shoulder and shaking his head.

            Hogan couldn’t suppress a grin.

            “Why do you want to do this anyway?” he asked.

            “My dear man, I am something of a connoisseur of such things; I revere storms, I delight in tempests, I exult in hurricanes! The changing weather and the shifting seas, the mighty clashing of the elements in endless drama are a fascination of mine, and if I beheld every storm that has ever occurred from the day that the earth was formed, I could not delight in them any the less. And so, the chance to experience a really first-class tropical storm at sea is something I simply cannot pass up.”

            Hogan laughed, shrugged, and looked over at Hendricks.

            “Well, Mr. Hendricks, it looks like we’ll all be enjoying the weather tonight; will you be joining us?”

            Hendricks opened his mouth to say no, of course not, that he would be staying below deck, like any sane man would. But as he did so, it suddenly struck him how tall Hogan was, and how strong he seemed. You could always tell a real serviceman, he thought. And he thought how huge and strong and joyful Ralph was. Even Lucas the crewman, who was rolling his eyes and chewing his pipe, was tough and leathery, with enormous muscles. As a matter of fact, it occurred to him (not for the first time) that he, Hendricks, was a rather small man; five-foot six, not particularly strong, with a small voice and large, brown, puppy-dog eyes. Not particularly impressive compared to the specimens accompanying him.

            “Yeah, I suppose so,” he found himself saying. “If Ralph’s going to stay above deck, I guess I might as well too.”

            Hendricks immediately regretted saying this, but realized that it was too late to change his mind when Hogan clapped him hard on the shoulder in a congratulatory fashion. It hurt.

            “That’s what I like to hear,” said Hogan. “Good to see a man with some hair on his chest.”

            Smarting from the undeserved compliment, and glumly wishing he had the guts to be a real coward, Hendricks found himself an hour later, bound in a yellow life jacket and holding on for dear life to a rope around the mast as the Michelle was rocked and tossed by the waves and the rain and wind bore down upon him.

            “Oompah!” Ralph shouted gleefully as another wave crashed over them. “Isn’t this delightful?”

            Hendricks didn’t trust himself to answer, even if he thought he could be heard over the wind and peals of thunder. He settled for shooting Ralph a dirty look.

            A bolt of lightning lit the sky, followed instantly by a roar of thunder. Ralph clapped as though it were a fireworks display. He said something, but even his voice was drowned in another peal of thunder that followed almost immediately.

            “A double-header!” were his first audible words afterward. “This is even better than I had hoped!”            

            The Michelle lurched violently. It pitched up on a great hill of water and then plunged down into the valley that opened before it, only to crash head-on into the next hill.

            “Oompah!” Ralph shouted again as the warm salt-water smashed against them.

            Hendricks coughed and spat out seawater. By now he was cold, soaked-through, and very annoyed. He was so annoyed, as a matter of fact, that he started to shout at Ralph to remind him that he, Hendricks, was supposed to be here to relax and recover from a breakdown, and whether Ralph thought this was conducive to that end. He only got as far as “Ralph, I don’t know if you…” before another wave sent what felt like a pint of seawater directly into his open mouth.

            “What?” Ralph called cheerfully as Hendricks coughed and retched. “I didn’t catch that!”

            Hendricks considered trying again, but then another lightning bolt arched across the sky, accompanied by a roar even louder than the previous two.

            “That does it!” Hendricks shouted, his temper getting the better of him. “I’m going below!”

            “You can’t do that!” Ralph reminded him. “We need to hold on…”        

            “I don’t care!” Hendricks shouted, letting go and stumbling towards the cabin door. “I’ve had enough!”

            “Don’t be a fool, man!” Ralph called. “Get back here!”

            Hendricks ignored him. The cabin door was only about ten feet away. He could reach it easily enough…

            Another wave struck the yacht, causing it to lurch hard to port. Hendricks was thrown off his feet and slid sideways. He struck the rail painfully and grabbed it in a tight grip. As he tried to get his feet back under him, the yacht tipped sideways, and as it did Hendricks looked up to find himself almost at the same level as the water.      

            As he looked (this all seemed to take quite a long time), Hendricks saw a wave reaching up to him, as though it were the enormous hand of some sea-dwelling giant. He almost fancied he saw the water form into fingers. It reached him, seized him in a cold, powerful grip, and wrenched him overboard.

            Hendricks had no impression of striking the water; the water had already come up and grabbed him. He had a few confused, terrifying moments of suffocating blackness, during which he clawed his way up through the churning mass of water, before his head broke the surface. He just had time to draw a deep breath when the ocean rose up and covered him once more. Again he struggled upwards, and again he had no more gasped a single drought of air before another wave came and swallowed him.

            Finally, on his third attempt he managed to stay on the surface long enough to get his bearings.

            At first, there was no immediate sign of the Michelle. Hendricks had just enough time to wonder whether it had been swallowed up by the same wave that took him when another swell of water revealed a small collection of lights a good hundred yards off. It also, however, revealed another, much larger collection of lights farther off.

            Another flash of lightning illuminated the scene, and Hendricks realized that the larger collection of lights was an island. An island, moreover, with people on it.

            The trouble was that the ocean was threatening to take him right past it.

            Hendricks started swimming. He hadn’t gone more than a few yards when another wave grabbed him and hurled him back. He kept swimming, and yet another wave hurled him back. He made an indistinct noise of frustration and pressed onward. But however hard he swam, it felt like he was making no progress at all. His wet clothes dragged in the water, and his lifejacket made it so the waves threw him even further each time.

            Hendricks didn’t know how long he kept this up. It felt like at least an hour. His muscles were screaming and his lungs were burning. The salt in his water-soaked clothes chaffed painfully against his skin, and his mouth was parched from exhaustion and salt intake. But at least he could see that the island was closer now. The Michelle had disappeared, but Hendricks couldn’t worry about that at the moment. His life now depended entirely upon reaching that island.

            He gritted his teeth, put his head down, and tried to redouble his efforts. Agony shot through his whole body as his muscles shrieked in protest. Hendricks found himself wondering whether he might be able to survive even if he let the sea take him away from the island; after all, he had his lifejacket and surely someone would go looking for him, right? And if they didn’t, would drowning be such a horrible fate?

            Hendricks’s mind drifted back to his childhood in Massachusetts. He had lived in a small island town, which was full of fishermen and sailors who would tell endless stories of life at sea. One of them, an eight-fingered old Jew with no more hair than a billiard ball, named Gould, claimed that he had actually drowned and come back to life:

            “You’re trying to breathe,” he said. “But there’s nothing to breathe, and as your lungs fill with water, it’s like they’re on fire. Drownin’ feels like you’re burning to death from the inside out.”

            Hendricks gritted his teeth and tried to swim harder. No, drowning wasn’t going to be an option, he decided. He had to make it to that island!

            But even as he renewed his determination, he began to find his strength wasn’t going to match it. His muscles flatly refused to work any harder than they were working, and it quickly became apparent that they weren’t even going to keep that up for long. But he was close now; close enough that the waves were almost taking him into the island rather than past it. Just a few more minutes and he could stop swimming and let the waves carry him…

            Lightning lit the sky again, and Hendricks felt despair overwhelm him.

            The island ahead of him had no visible beach. Its shore was a jumble of rocks in front of a sheer cliff, against which the waves were slamming with enough force to break him into little pieces.

            There was no way out. He couldn’t keep swimming, even if he thought his body would allow it; he was almost too close as it was. He would have to trust that someone would come looking for him, bobbing alone out in the Caribbean. Though, he realized, if the Michelle had been heading for those same rocks, chances were that he’d outlive all of them, meaning that no one in the world would know where he was. He would drift for a few days, alone and forgotten, until he died of thirst. That’s if the sharks didn’t find him first, of course. Unless he just unhooked his lifejacket and ended it all himself.

            “Burning to death from the inside out…”

            How had he come to this? And more importantly, what had done with his life? Had the world been any better off for having him in it? He couldn’t think of how. As far back as he looked, he saw nothing but disappointment and cowardice. He hadn’t had any ambitions in school; he had just gotten by. He only became a cop to avoid going to Vietnam…and the war had ended less than a year later anyway.

            But then, when he had tried to do something more, what had happened? He joined the Miami PD, screwed up a couple times, and had a breakdown at his first real crisis. Which had led him here: a fittingly absurd end to a worthless life.

            Hendricks’s ruminations were interrupted by a loud splash; loud enough or close enough that he heard it despite the noise of the wind and the waves. He looked around, and as he did so he caught sight of something white bobbing in the waves, running parallel to the island.

            Somehow, Hendricks immediately knew that this was a guide. He started to swim, and was rather surprised to find that he still could. His muscles had seemingly gone numb at this point.

            The white object continued to bob along, now hidden by the waves, now just visible. Hendricks tried to get a better look at it, but it kept popping in and out of the water, as though it were weighted down and only a small part of it could float.

            It led Hendricks along the line of the cliff toward the edge of the island. As it did so, Hendricks would have laughed if he still had the energy. Of course! The cliffs were only part of the island’s shore line! There must be something more serviceable around the other end…

            But he also noticed a problem; the cliffs jutted out at what he took to be a bend in the island. To get around them, he would have to pass uncomfortably close to the rocks, even as the waves seemed to be slamming against them with renewed fury. His guide, however, kept going, apparently undeterred by the danger, so Hendricks resolutely followed it.

            When we’re thoroughly exhausted, our minds have a tendency to wander in an attempt to distract us from our own agony. Hendricks’s mind once again was recalling the sailors’ tales he had heard all his life; of wil-o-the-whisps, the lights at sea which sometimes would guide ships to safety, other times into disaster. Still other times, he remembered, they would lead to neither, but they would take the traveler…somewhere else. To the lost seas, dream-islands, or Faerie Land. He might vanish forever, or he might return a different man…

            The white guide vanished just as Hendricks was reaching the jutting-out cliffs. With a strangled yell of determination, he threw every last bit of effort he had left into passing it. He was almost there…the waves struck it like a bomb blast. He was level…the waves were drawing back for more…he was half-way through…the waves roared forth and carried him forward. The waves smashed into the rock, but miraculously, Hendricks didn’t. He could feel the submerged rocks grating against his hands and feet, but he had been spared being crushed against the wall. The waves pulled back again…but now he was passed.

            On the other side of the wall, he found himself in a broad, half-moon-shaped bay bordered mostly by a sandy beach. He was breathing so hard that it hurt, but he just managed to put a little more distance between himself and the rocks before he surrendered to the tide as it drew him inwards toward shore. Once he felt bottom, he forced himself to crawl forward at least a little way up the beach before he collapsed in dead faint.   

Next Week:
Chapter Two: The Dreamer