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 Means to an End --- Chapter 25
by Nathaniel Perkins
I sleep poorly, the burns on my arms and face simmer with the memory of heat and pull my dry skin taut. The day passes in foggy glimpses borrowed in half waking moments and incorporated into the myriad of dream images my healing body conjures forth once restless sleep overtakes me again. Smith might be up and about at one point, but I can not tell. Nothing comes pounding at our hatch. I wake with a start late into the night. The room has grown bitterly cold, gouts of wispy smoke marking perfect time with my breathing in front of my face. Smith is curled into a ball and shivering. Outside, beyond the borders of the Centurion, I can hear the ominous booming crashes of the nocturnal ice floes. The water closet offers up a few towels that will have to serve as supplementary blankets for the remainder of the evening. Nothing short of the direct mental domination of the Captain will pull me from the cabin this night. I have had my share of the deadly moon and his coterie of evil nocturnal events.
Smith wakes me late into the next morning. "We need to move around while the sun is out. See if we can find anyone else." He is finishing the last of another piece of fruit and taking stock of our resources. The room contains little to our benefit. The axe, although I do not think Smith can manage to swing it again without reopening the wound on his arm. The two pistols with a box of bullets. A gunny sack for food with a small pile of rations consisting mostly of alien fruit and a jam jar. My writing supplies and materials, I will not be leaving them behind again. An odd thought occurs to me while I contemplate my journal. Why do I keep the thing? Why do I insist on recording these strange happenings? Who will read it, and who will care?
Smith notices my look, and, either reads my thoughts or I have again slipped and spoken my mind for anyone to hear. "Someone will find it one day. They will wonder at this ship and why it came to be where ever it is and that journal will be the only tangible clue that they will have to work with." He pauses for a bit and looks at me. "I have read some of it, you know. Most of it actually. While you were asleep. It is a good thing that you do."
"Thank you, I suppose. At least someone besides myself has read it." I chuckle, a tiny spark of once lost lightheartedness returning to me for a brief moment. "I have an idea for it that has just come to me, however."
"What is it?" Smith looks back at the tome, as if expecting it to reveal some message from across the room. It is a smallish thing, not meant for exhaustive writing. I picked it up to pass the time on the trip, having filled most of my last journal and not wanting to cram the wonders I was certain to experience on my cross Atlantic sojourn into the last few pages of another time in my life like some vestigial appendage sewn on as an afterthought. It is ugly, now that I give it a closer look. Battered, with an irritatingly dull pattern on its cloth covering. There is very little about the thing that can be considered remarkable on the outside or the inside, I think with a bleak turn away from my momentary amusement.
"I need candles, as many as we can find." I say in answer to Smith’s question. "I need to see if I can find something else, as well. I will be back in a few minutes." And with that cryptic promise, I head out into the corridor. Light pours in from either end of the hallway, the brilliant foreign sun shining high in the cloudless sky above, I am certain. At the door to Mother and Daughter’s room, I pause. It is daytime now, might they be awake, or alert? Resigned to the possibility that I am about to enter a very awkward situation, I open the hatch and step into the room. It is similar to how I last saw it, Mother and Daughter are in the far bed, alive and comatose. The nearest bed, however, contains only Host One. Host Two, the gentlemen I kicked out of Smith’s new bed, is nowhere to be found. The Engine Room? The thought bubbles up unbidden into my mind. The face of the woman I shot swims before me and I experience a brief bout of dizziness. We are less than cogs in this machine, I realize, we were buckets of fuel. It is the passengers that are pushing the Centurion forward, day after day. The Captain is burning us, withering us, sucking away our life essence to power his flight across this unending sea. I slump against the wall and slide to the floor. It is no wonder that the creature is angry over desertions, every drop of us is sacred to him.
Minutes pass. Terrible minutes. The dizziness comes in spots growing and shrinking in asymmetric time before my eyes. The Captain. The thing that has consumed him. The Centurion. The Endless Sea. The Icebergs. The Moon. The Navigator. The Man at the Railing. The First Officer. Sink. Nicholas. James. Caleb. The Chittering on the Beach. Everything is slamming through my head flashing images in front of my eyes. I am gasping for breath and clutching my head. There is a way out of this maze, I console myself with that elusive promise over and over again.
"There is a way out." There. I have said it. I have said it and it must be true. And just as suddenly as the dizziness begins, it leaves me and I know the path I must follow. Rifling through the bureau and then the nightstand finds the item I originally sought. Daughter’s diary is smaller than my journal, covered with flowers and smelled faintly of lavender. A tiny clasp with a tiny keyhole tears off with little effort on my part and I opened the thing and flip through it. Garbage. That whimsy and ignorance of a small child. There are about ten pages filled and I rip them out, tossing them aside with little concern for where they land. Another minute and another mission and the I leave that tomb to return to Smith and our new cabin.
Smith is not in residence, exploring, investigating, perhaps getting me candles. I take the opportunity to clean myself and my pistols. That task complete, I set to work on my new project. Smith returns after an hour or so, he has a small bag of candles and a little more food.
"What are you working on?" He asks, taking the candles out of the bag and placing them on the bureau.
"Copying my journal. I am going to encase a duplicate in wax and leave it on the ship." The wax might keep it somewhat preserved. It will keep the water out, at least.
"Good idea!" Smith pauses and looks at me thoughtfully. "But, doesn’t that imply…"
"We should leave the ship." I say with sudden conviction. "It is a death trap. More so now than ever before. We should find the right moment and strike out, make our way somewhere that is not ruled by that thing in the Engine Room."
"Where would we go?" Smith asks, deflated by my resolve. I do not understand. Smith is the strong one. He should not be the one to shirk at a new development. Why, then, does he seem to wilt at the suggestion of abandoning the Centurion?
"Where are we going now?" I counter. "The Captain is using us for fuel." I continue cryptically. "Time is short for everyone now. We need to leave soon, before it is our turn on that metal slab." Smith turns pale at the memory and runs his hand over his injured arm.
"When? All of the other passengers who have left…it has not gone well for them." The island. The Chittering.
"Not until I complete the copy of my journal. As you said, someday someone somewhere will find the Centurion. You are right, there should be a record."
"Wax?" Smith looks at the candles he brought.
"Keep the water out. In case the ship sinks or suffers a similar disaster."
Smith nods at the logic and retires again to his bed. I continue copying. After a while he says, "There is something on the horizon. Land mass, probably, there is a great deal of mist and it is hard to see. There might be merit to leaving the ship now. If it is real land, and not a third killer island, it might be time." His voice is drifting and thoughtful, more in his mind and to himself than to me and the rest of the room. I made a non-committal noise and continue my work.
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