Orphans on Granite Tides by Adam S. Cantwell

Author:Adam S. Cantwell [Cantwell, Adam S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: strange, Horror, Fantastique
Publisher: Ex Occidente Press (Les Editions de L'Oubli)
Published: 2013-05-29T22:00:00+00:00

4.

MS. OF A CALIFORNIA INDIAN

PART II

[HIS PASSAGE TO SEVASTOPOL]

Each individual of the Hidden People is, in himself, a lost continent.

Before we left Yerba Buena, before they were exposed as frauds and I was confined below decks, the Germans showed me a globe they had borrowed from the ship’s captain. I’d seen maps at Fort Ross before, and Miroslav had explained to

me how Europeans understood the shape of the world. But the globe seemed to be a joke about a map. At first I misunderstood it as a kind of book; I ran my finger over the lacquered paper looking for a way to turn a page. The totality of all the world’s maps on this sinister brown ball. I had learned in the forest that the continents it showed were once lost, that they once lay under seas of different shape. I knew that the hidden people wanted to make out of the shifting world something solid, wanted to rebuild the planet starting from the fundament, making a hard dry husk like this globe with its seas of ink and paper…

Why couldn’t I foresee that crossing the seas would bring me within their grasp?

A few days out of port, during one of their drinking sessions with the captain, the Germans wore out their welcome or else unwittingly exposed the truth about themselves. They were clapped in irons and their chests were confiscated. I, another chattel, was threatened with being thrown in the sea. But the pseudo-Chamisso, as distracted as he surely was, managed to argue successfully that I should be kept on board, that I might be good for something. So I was locked away below decks in a dark space between the ribs of the ship and soon forgotten.

In my miserable berth I grew deathly ill. The cold and torpor drew what was left of me to my low-lying parts; here my pain and ennui sloshed and setded and was distilled. The whispering proximity of the lethal sea called these dregs down ever further, and day after day my spirit seeped through tar and pitch and blackly down.

My liquid remains decanted through desert voids of seawater. It was an alien medium, primal, its essence was not the tang that clings to the red flesh of salmon or the morning chill borne on the fog, but the dead-cold and salt of bones and freezing stars. My nothing-substance popped and dispersed, particles radiant from a dumb core, shreds of lost desire given over to huge black currents.

No possibility of sound, firm denial of subtle space, the salt wilderness solid on all sides... The hallucinations of the gamut of non-existence rose out of the miles-deep... then, from beneath the wave-roots, a dead analog of light and a booming report like the hollow voice of an ultimate bell.

At the bottom, savage titan rocks, a seam in the earth, a stupendous trench billowing heat. Here I crept under the table of the world, where, borne by a current suctioning to hell, all the refuse of the surface passed a terminus.

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