A Song For The Void: A Historical Horror Novel by Andrew C. Piazza

Author:Andrew C. Piazza [Piazza, Andrew C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-07-14T22:00:00+00:00

25

Everything is constantly shifting on the sea. Nothing is ever static. All is motion and change; the wind, the waves. There is no foundation on which to anchor oneself.

Those who have never lived on the sea do not understand how easy it is to get lost. Nothing is stable. There are no landmarks. It is a constantly flowing, changing, upending environment, tossing one this way, that way, until one’s bearings are hopelessly lost.

And with nothing solid to cling to, it is very easy to lose one’s mind along with one’s bearings. When all perspective is lost and there is no sense of which way to turn, a person will cling to any beacon that will give them some direction.

And now I sat in sick bay, trying to find some North Star to which I could anchor my mind, something that would keep me from madness. Everything I’d seen and heard over the last few days had to have some consistent thread that explained it all.

The hallucinations. The murders. The burnt ship. The insanity that seemed to be infecting more and more of the crew.

I needed to start at the beginning. The strangeness all began after we had engaged the pirate fleet, when we first saw that thing in the sky that William Wright had called the Darkstar. We’d been using it almost like a beacon to follow the pirate fleet to some supposed island base; perhaps it could start as a beacon to my line of inquiry as well.

The Darkstar. Not a star, I think, Commander Hughes had said that first night we’d spotted it. And perhaps not a comet, as well, I thought now.

That thing in the sky the burnt men had called the Darkstar had to be involved somehow. But sorting it all out and finding the connections to the bizarre events of the last few days felt like trying to navigate the sea with no compass.

The hallucinations. The men murdering each other, by mistake or with purpose. The burnt men on the derelict junk, careless about their own deaths. The repeated mention of the island and using the Darkstar as a beacon to get there. And, the opium.

It had to be the opium.

Opium itself does not cause hallucinations. Vivid, fanciful dreams, yes, but not wakeful hallucinations, certainly not this realistic. And I had experienced hallucinations after taking opium from two different sources; first, smoking the captured opium, and second, laudanum from our own ship’s stores. One might be tainted with a hallucinogenic substance, but both? Impossible.

Higgs had gone mad after being given laudanum, first pitching himself overboard, then threatening the engine crew, all to get closer to this nameless, unseen island. Then, he killed Doctor Corbyn, claiming he thought it was Boggs. And having seen what I had seen recently, I now believed him. Or at least, I believed that he thought that he’d seen Boggs.

Jack had spoken of seeing an island with his family on it, shortly after I’d given him opium on the cutter at the start of all this mess.

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