The Call of Distant Shores (39 page)

From behind, strong fingers gripped suddenly beneath Jeremy's arms, and he was jerked from the rail and hauled up and back.
 
The ship was no more steady than before, but the danger of slipping side to side had passed, and moments later Jeremy crashed to the wall of what must have been the ship's cabin.

"Get inside!"
 
The words screamed through his eardrums, blocking out the storm, just for an instant, and Jeremy turned, wild-eyed.
 
Terry stood there – not Terry – taller with similar features.
 
The man's hair waved wildly about his head and his eyes smoldered with barely-controlled anger – and strength.

"Get below, damn you!" The man repeated, cuffing Jeremy on the side of the head.
 
"I've not enough men to make it without you."

Other hands groped from the shadowed doorway of the cabin and Jeremy was jerked inside, just as another wave crashed across the deck and threatened to drag him back to the railing, or further.
 
As he tumbled backward into the shadows, Jeremy caught a last lightning flash.
 
The woman's figure stared out over the waves stoically.

His foot caught on the top stair, and he tumbled, ignoring the loud cursing of whoever it was that had dragged him to safety.
 
He felt the contact as the two of them slammed into the wall, then continued back and down, banging one knee painfully and twisting mid-air to try and get his hands beneath him.
 
There was nothing.
 
Nothing but shadow, and as he passed to darkness, he felt damp wood as his hands struck first, chin following in a jarring tangle of tar-soaked hemp and salt-soaked planks.
 
The darkness that followed was sudden, and complete.

Jeremy returned to consciousness amid the scents of leather and tobacco.
 
His head pounded painfully, and his eyes refused to focus.
 
The room was adrift in smoke – tobacco smoke, pungent and overpowering.
 
He coughed, hand rising to cover his mouth and body convulsing until he bent nearly double from the effort to draw clean air into his lungs.
 
His eyes stung, and he could barely focus through the pain, so he closed them tightly.

"Quite a tumble."

The words hung in the air, making no sense coming from the direction and voice that they did.
 
Jeremy brushed his fingers gingerly over the growing knot on his head and forced his eyes open once more.

He was in the back room of the barber shop.
 
The old refrigerator hummed too-loudly against the wall.
 
Terry sat across the table from him, an open beer resting between cupped palms.

"I was wrong," Terry went on.
 
"Been here by myself so long, I'd started to think things would come full-circle and end.
 
Seemed right.
 
Now I see she's been
callin
' you back all along."

"She?" Jeremy coughed the word out, making it a question.

Terry just watched him, raising his beer and taking a long drink.

"You know who I mean," he said at last.
 
"Now I have a story –
the
story.
 
You just sit there and try to concentrate."

Terry rose slowly, moving to the refrigerator and drawing forth a second cold beer, which he carried across the room and placed in front of Jeremy on the table.
 
The barber untwisted the cap with a quick jerk of his wrist and left the bottle to stand, tiny wisps of steam rising from the neck to remind Jeremy of the ship – the waves.
 
The throbbing in his head subsided to a dull ache, and he rose, moving the leather chair he was leaning back in closer to the table and grabbing the beer tightly.
 
He raised the cold glass to press against his temple for a moment, then took a drink and met Terry's gaze.

"Tell me."

"It started in Scotland," Terry began slowly.
 
His eyes, and his voice, took on a distance and a depth they'd not seemed to possess previously.
 
"None of our fathers were even gleams in their own father's eyes at the time, but one thing was the same.
 
The ocean.
 
Even then, when women waited by the fires and wars were fought hand to hand, enemies staring one another in the eye and defying death, she called to us.
 
There was one who answered.

"Angus was his name, and he took to the sea so young they say he was sailing from near the day he was born.
 
The son of a son of a sea captain, bred to the ocean – the far shore.
 
Born with the burning need to see what lay beyond the next wave.
 
Angus Griswold belonged to the sea.

"Until he met her," Terry stopped, nodding toward the door, and the barber shop beyond – the woman hanging on the wall – the world that seemed so distant Jeremy could scarcely grant it credence.

"She was the daughter of a merchant he met in his travels.
 
Angus wasn't one to settle in one place, but the day he met her, he found that an anchor had been cast that would not dislodge.
 
She was beautiful.
 
Beyond anything he'd seen, rivaling even the blue of the deepest lagoons and the scent of the islands after a storm, she drew him.
 
At night, on the deck of his ship, he would think of her, writing letters long into the night, only to crumple them and toss them aside in anger, drowning his imagination in rum and dark thoughts, until even his men began to talk.

"He returned to Scotland, soon after, and erected a keep overlooking the waves, tall and strong of stone dragged from the very edge of the sea.
 
All that time, he kept her face in his heart.
 
He wrote more letters, and eventually, a few of them weren't crumpled.
 
He sent the first, then the second, and when she replied to his third, he wrote again, until at last he found himself before her father, a tall, thin man with piercing eyes.
 
You've seen those eyes, mirrored in the countenance of his daughter.

"They were wed, soon after, and settled into that keep.
 
That prison."

"Prison?" Jeremy asked, finally finding the courage and strength to take the beer in a shaky hand and draw deep.
 
"You said it was a keep."

"It was that," Terry said softly.
 
"It kept him from his other love – his oldest love.
 
It kept him from the sea while holding it out before him like a carrot dangled before an ass.
 
She loved him, Jeremy.
 
She loved him with all her heart, mind – soul.
 
She loved him, and in the end, it wasn't enough.

"Ten years to the day after he brought her home, Angus bought a boat.
 
He told her it would be for short trips - jaunts up the coast and back, but she knew.
 
In his eyes, the waves danced, and the sun set over shores with unknown lines.

"He sailed within the year."

"Sailors have always sailed away," Jeremy said, lifting his eyes to meet the barber's.
 
"They come home."

"Not Angus," Terry shook his head and sipped his beer.
 
"Not that time.

"He was gone a year before she began to really worry, sending letters home to her father, who was less than sympathetic.
 
He'd received her dowry, and she was aging – still beautiful, but not of marrying age, and still married, in any case, to Angus.
 
The year stretched into another, and another – ten years, Jeremy.
 
She lived alone in that keep for ten years, spending the money Angus had amassed in a life of sailing and trade, and pining for the one thing that had drawn her to the ocean's side.
 
The one thing she couldn't have.

"Every night she watched at the balcony outside her room until the sun set and the moon rose high above the waves.
 
Every night she prayed.
 
Some say, near the end, when the loneliness had started to make her crazy, that she prayed to others than the God we know.
 
There were books found in her towers, books none could place, or translate – some written by hand, others printed in far-away lands.
 
Angus must have brought them home, but it was obvious that his lover was the one to find their use.

"Then one day, the ship returned."

"You said he never came back."

"And he did not.
 
The ship came back.
 
Most of his men came back.
 
Angus died of a fever, wasted him away to nothing in the cabin of that ship.
 
They buried him at sea, but before he died, he set them to bring his boat home.
 
To bring her the treasures and secrets of the world he'd found.
 
To tell her he loved her.

"None of it mattered.
 
They pulled in and she flew to that shore a woman possessed, to find no man, but only wealth.
 
Only salt-soaked board and men too-long away from home.
 
Only more loneliness washed ashore.

"They brought it all to her, and she held a feast such as had not been seen in those parts since Angus himself was alive.
 
They drowned themselves in the food they'd missed and the local girls, washed it all down with barrels of wine.
 
She watched, smiling all the while as if she was sharing their good humor.

"When they woke, every man-jack was locked in that ballroom.
 
She'd had men come in during the night and bar the doors with stout planks.
 
They were left to rot with what remained of the food, and the wine, even the women who'd joined them.
 
They carried on and wailed at her, even tried to set the place on fire.
 
None of it worked.
 
They were trapped, and she was going to go and let them stay, leave and never come back."

Jeremy shuddered, casting a glance at the door – toward what lay beyond.
 
"What happened?" he asked softly.

"That night, she stood on her balcony as always," Terry replied.
 
"As she stood, staring into the waves, he came to her.
 
Moss was matted and woven into the long hairs of his beard, and his eyes were half-eaten by fish, but he came, staggering from the waves.
 
She just watched him come, no effort to help him, or to hinder.
 
She watched as he staggered to the walls of the keep and beat his rotting hands against the stone walls.

"Let them go," he cried.
 
"Let them go, my love.
 
I've come back."

"No one knows for certain if she listened," Terry said at last.
 
"She released the men the next day, giving them back enough of what they'd brought her to build a new ship.
 
She made certain that everything was perfect – every board, every sail – hand-picked.
 
And she sent for an artist.
 
A young man, some say a Eunuch.
 
He brought the wood with him from Egypt, a solid block of it, taking up half his cart.
 
As the ship was built, the man worked."

"She sailed with that ship?" Jeremy asked, breaking the silence.

"No.
 
She died.
 
She died, alone in her tower, leaning on the wall that overlooked the waves below, but the work was finished, and when they saw what she'd commissioned, the work the eunuch had left, the men would not leave her behind."

Both men stared at the doorway now.
 
Beyond it, they could feel the draw of the wood, dark and curving tightly to the wall behind, eyes sockets of something darker than shadow.
 
In their heads, a voice, calling out softly.

"Your great grandfather found that ship," Jeremy breathed.
 
"He brought her here."

Terry rose, turning toward the refrigerator again without a word, and the lights flickered, suddenly, threatened to die, then steadied.
 
They were dimmer, their radiance more yellow, and Jeremy staggered half to his feet, bracing himself on the arms of the chair as the floor lurched sickeningly.

"Damn," Terry cursed.
 
He turned back, a brown-necked bottle in his hand.
 
Tipping it up, he took a long swig and strode across the deck to where Jeremy now stood, wild-eyed and staring at the doorway, now a stairway once more.
 
Beyond the walls, the waves crashed, and Terry – not Terry – handed over the bottle with a wild-eyed stare.

"We can't let her go down," the man whispered softly, almost plaintively.
 
"We must keep her afloat.
 
She ... she loves me."

Jeremy took the bottle, turned to the stairs, and staggered through – into the clear night air beneath the stars.
 
The moon was bright and full.
 
He downed the beer in a single gulp and fell heavily over the hood of his car.
 
In the shadows behind him, he felt the weight of eyes, and the call of farther shores.