Warm Waters (Finale)

He could not say for sure, not for all the sun of the Sahara, whether he was conscious or unconscious, dead or alive. He didn’t feel a thing. He did not know whether he floated in the sea or in the ether. He could not pinch his arm to find out whether he was awake. He wasn’t even sure there was still a hand at the end of his arm, or whether he had arms at all. He was weightless and bodiless like a breath of air.

Then he heard a voice. It could have been the voice of the man on board or his own. It could have been a figment of his imagination.

‘If I had told you yesterday that you would die serene and in peace, you wouldn’t have believed me. You would have shouted and cursed and splashed and moaned. And why should you have believed me? Yesterday you were nothing but a spoilt brat who had never asked himself who he was. You’d never stood in front of a mirror and given an honest look at yourself. Now you do. Nobody needs to say now what you are and what your life has been. No heavenly judge, no eulogy from a saddened relative, no three-line obituary will define you or measure you. You define yourself. So tell me, now that the ocean has frozen and neutralised the animal impulse to survive for survival’s sake, what do you see? What’s left of you? Can you find the spark of the fire divine? Can you find a good person, a life that stands on its own? Or is there but a beast, a time more or less pleasurable, more or less honest, but apathic and absurd? If I took you know out of the water, and wrapped you in foil blankets, and inject you with whatever substances can bring your body out from the cold, if I gave you your life back, in short, what would you return to? Would you find the will within yourself to claim your place among the living, or after seeing you like you are, no instincts, no inertia, have you found out there is nothing worth claiming?’

‘But you had no right’ he said to the voice that could be that of the man on board or his own or nobody’s. ‘You had no right.’

‘When you crush an ant with the tip of your finger, do you ask permission? Do you ask forgiveness? I killed you because I could. But tell me now, man in the water, are you an insect after all, or are you a man?

When he was a child, his family had a very little boat, with the hull painted dark blue. It had a little cabin where it got really hot; his dad used to nap there after a sandwich lunch. They would drop the anchor off the shore of a little island less than half an hour away from the harbour, and spend the day there swimming and toasting under the beautifully scorching hot sun. If there was a south wind, they’d stay on the northern part, which was his favourite. It was rocky and full of hiding places, with some shallows where he’d stand, over the mossy-like seaweed that looked like a thick forest seen from the window of a plane. He’d dive six or nine feet deep and the world would explode to red, purple and green. Starfish and little anemone, sea urchins and creatures for which he had no name would waive and dance with the currents. If he was lucky, there would be octopusses. He’d get close enough to alarm them and then they would spread their tentacles and crawl gracefully away, flashing colours at him, white, maroon, purple. Shaols of little silver fish would dance away from him, exploding with a beam of gold when touched by a ray of sun. All those lidless, glass eyes watching him. He’d stay suspended under water for as long as he could hold his breath, and he felt part of it all.

When he emerged to breathe his parents would check how blue his lips were. He had to be sternly commanded before he agreed to get out. He’d climb the removable white ladders that the waves swinged and banged against the hull, sometimes trapping his fingers. His dad would get his snorkel and mask and then the flippers would come off. His feet would feel suddenly disabled and minuscule. He’d be welcome on board with a big, weathered towel that had been under the sun for hours. His mom or his dad would hold him as they wrapped him in it and keep holding him until they were sure he was out of the cold.

The man on board lifted him onto the stern platform with an groan of effort, and stripped him off his diving suit with the aid of his own knife. The blade scratched the skin here and there, even though it was handed with care, and yet no blood poured out. The snorkel, mask and flippers were tossed on deck but the knife was placed in his fist, which was clenched so tight that a couple of fingers had to be broken to allow the handle in. It was another little struggle to cross his arms on his chest. The man on board combed back the other man’s hair and examined his work. It looked like one of these sleeping figures that one sometimes finds on the sarcophagi of kings or rich merchants from olden times. He stroke his head. There was possession and intimacy in that gesture. He pushed him off the platform and into the westwards current. Had he been aware of it, the man in the water might have relished the idea of a Viking funeral.


The man on board didn’t stay to watch the body sink. I hate goodbyes, he would have said. The ocean extended in every direction and he would wander on it for hours, defying the endurance of his fuel tank, almost to the verge of being stranded for ever in the same current that was taking his victim west and then down, down, down, and then nowhere. Man and boat were so small, so insignificant lost in the boundless, indifferent ocean. Blink once and they’re gone.


THE END

Warm Waters, Chapter 8

‘You’ll love the third story. It’s about you.’

The man in the water hated the other man’s smirk. It was poisonous.

‘About ten years ago, this young girl went to college. In a party she was gang-banged by six or seven older students. She could never say exactly how many or who they were, because they drugged her with god knows what before they did what they wanted to her. The rapists were quite passed out themselves. She reported it but the couple of guys who she identified denied it was rape. The judge accepted their defense that it being a frat party she should have known what she was going there for. He didn’t even accept he had been drugged against her will. He didn’t demand the students to name the rest of the boys. In short, he blamed it all on her.

>>The girl went on to marry her boyfriend, a sailorman. For ten years she struggled with depression, anxiety, agoraphobia, and just plain nightmares. Then one night she drowned in her bath, after taking too many sleeping pills. The doctors could never say if it was an accident or suicide.’

The man in the water thought about the bath’s warm waters.

‘What does that have to do with me?’ he said, of course only managing to squeeze out one out of every three words, and that with painful difficulty.

‘You know what.’ Said the man on board. ‘Because you were there when it happened.’

The man in the water gasped.

‘Never.’ He said, struggling to go beyond the ‘n’.

‘How many mornings in college did you wake up and remembered absolutely nothing about the night before? How many nights were you so passed out you forgot even your name?’

Too many, thought to himself the man in the water, his face contorted, his eyes blank, his stomach upturned.

‘Your mates, I hunted them down, one by one. They told me your name. I made them believe they could get away if they named the other guys. Poor bastards. The look on their faces when they realised I had lied.’

The man in the water had no breath to retort with.

‘You lie’ he said, in a whisper, more a prayer than an assertion.

‘How did you first heard from me? How did you learned about my fishing trips?’

A leaflet under his door, every week for three months.

‘Have you heard of any of your old college mates these last couple of years?’

He hadn’t.

‘Never!’ he said. ‘I’d never! I couldn’t!’ he shouted, trying to shut up the shadow of a doubt that had started to grow deep inside him, too odious to be heeded.

‘Oh, but you did.’ Retorted the man on board, unassailable. ‘You did. You know you did.’

‘No!’ he bellowed, his eyes shut, his useless hands wagging on his ears.

So many things didn’t fit. So many things in his head screaming the story didn’t hold water. If only he could think clearly. If only he could go over the whole thing from the start. How did he get here, on that particular boat, on that particular weekend. How did he end up in the water –had he been induced to jump or had it been his decision all along. Hadn’t there been too many random actions the man on board couldn’t have possibly controlled? Wouldn’t he had heard about his mates if they started disappearing? But all these questions and many more had become a swarm of flies and bees inside his head. Thoughts started but didn’t conclude. They were left in the air and covered and clouded by the next, and the other, and the other. He wanted to grab just one of them and weigh it down it properly, but they all escaped him, slippery like eels. He simply couldn’t think straight. The confusion that announced his imminent death had settled in, at last.

‘What was her name?’ he clattered then.

The man on board smiled a huge grin of satisfaction and triumph.

‘Are you saying you choose the third story?’

The man in the water was puzzled. He had forgotten about their macabre game. He had thought he was finally hearing the truth of it all. So yes, you could say that he chose the third option.

‘Her name?’ he insisted, god knows why.

‘Is that a yes? The third story?’ The man on board refuse to let him get away without an answer, his will fixed upon his game.

The man in the water felt the torment of cold, his flesh like marble. His jaw was still clattering, but he realised the trembling in the rest of his body was subsiding. He was dying.

‘I’m so sorry’ he said then, very softly. He was not sure what he was apologising for. He was sorry about many other things, though. The fact is, he could have done something like that. What the fuck, most people can. If that was not a reason to be sorry, he didn’t know what was.

‘You have a big problem, man’ said the man on board, speaking very slowly, as if he wanted to make himself very clear. Words got to the man in the water as if through a veil. ‘If what I’ve told you is true, if this whole thing is a revenge for what you might have done to my wife, and if I’ve bothered so much to find you, and bring you here, and kill you, do you really think I’m going to let you go? Do you think I’ll let you live, just because you guessed right and you said you were sorry? Do you really think you’re saved?’

The man in the water closed his eyes. No, he didn’t. He didn’t. The sun was up. To him it appeared dimmed and white, and the blue of the sky looked pale and transparent like ice. He knew then. He just took full conscience of it, and accepted it. That was it.

‘Was it even the true story?’ the last will of the condemned man.

The man on board smiled.

‘You’ll never know.’

‘Any of them true?’ he rattled, not really expecting an answer.

‘You’ll never know. Does it really matter? Perhaps they all were. Perhaps none of them. It’s all part of the fun.’

The man in the water even smiled ever so slightly, as much as his stone cold face would allow.

‘The fun’ he whispered.

Warm Waters, Chapter 7

‘Very well, then, the second story. Yesterday you wanted to know how I got this scar.’ The captain rubbed his left calf, resting now over the gunwhale. One third of the flesh was gone, and a huge, dented, whiteish mark was left instead. ‘I told you it was a long story, but it really isn’t. The fact is, I was a greedy idiot and I got what I deserved.’ The man on board spoke in a matter-of-factly tone. ‘I used to work in a big cargo ship in the Red Sea. I found out soon enough they were smuggling arms into Somalia and Ethiopia. They were right twats, all of them, they acted as if they were transporting oranges. I was an idiot for staying, but the pay was good, so I did. One of them must have been smoking one of these disgusting little brown cigarettes they were so fond of where he shouldn’t have, and the fucking thing went off. The boat and its one hundred and fifty men went down. Guess how many lifeboats were there. Guess how many lifesavers. Guess how many of us were left floating in the water without any of these. The captain was scared he’d be prosecuted, so the bastard jumped on a boat and didn’t tell anyone about us. We were left there for almost three days.’

The captain didn’t seem particularly affected by any of it. He kept shrugging and shaking his head. The man in the water interrogated his inner alarm, but got no reply.

‘You’d say the worst was exhaustion and thirst.’ resumed the captain. ‘But nah, fear and terror keep your mind off these things. The worst were the sharks. Bulls and tigers, I think. I don’t know, I’m no expert. They came in hundreds, or so it felt. We had flares, spikes and debris from the shipwreck to try and scare them off. We formed circles and when one approached we’d scream and kick and try and whack them with sticks or whatever we could get our hands on. Sometimes it worked. Other times it didn’t. One thing about sharks is that when they come to you they don’t seem to have any life in them. They have dead eyes, black eyes, doll’s eyes. Until they bite. And then those dead eyes roll white, and the waters turn red, and you’d hear screaming like you never thought a human throat was capable of.’

The alarm had started to buzz madly. The man in the water didn’t know what it was yet. He kept listening. His heart had started to beat faster.

‘I remember looking into the sunset, just like you did last evening, and pissing my pants, pissing my pants with fear and looking down to the water, where my body disappeared halfway down as if I had been devoured already. I realised if they came from underneath I wouldn’t see them, I wouldn’t see my legs and waist being torn off in pieces, I wouldn’t see the blood. All I would see from my chest down would be inking blackness, and that would be it. My companions in the circle would swim away screaming, gather at a safe distance, if there was any, and look away, and even sing to cover the crying and shrieking. That is exactly what I did, again and again, that night, for a hundred of my mates. I can still remember some of the songs. They were all in their languages, so I only knew a few words or none, but still I sung them. I learned them when we loaded and unloaded that wretched cargo meant for arming children and slaughtering entire villages. Sometimes, in my nightmares, I still sing these songs while I am being devoured by things I cannot see.’

The man on board still appeared to be mysteriously placid. It made the alarm go insane.

‘The next morning, one third of the men had died. We went around checking the wounded, and pushing away the remains of the death, which were surrounded by shoals of little fish like a floating reef. You’d say it would have been a lot easier just to swim away from them, but we didn’t want to be apart from the flotsam, as if the open, desert see was scarier. A few of us tried to help the wounded. Some moaned, some were unconscious. Many others didn’t want us to bring bleeding men close to them, but we didn’t have the guts to do the smart thing and leave them to their own. Although tourniquets were applied liberally, tied with pieces of clothing and belts from the dead, who had also been stripped of their life vests when they wore one, bleeding was very rarely stopped. Soon we’d be pushing the bodies of these away with the others.

>>I remember the seabirds hounding the reefs of bodies. They flew over them and dived between them, for meat and for prey. I heard their crowing. If you closed your eyes you’d think you were in a harbour. I loved that sound, but to this day it still gives me the creeps sometimes.

Nobody in the world could have said at that time that the man on board was lying, making up thoughts and impressions as he went on. The alarm was appeased now, and the man in the water found it disturbing.

‘I went to wake up my friend, Hariq’ resumed the man on board. ‘He had his life vest lose and I though I’d wake him up and tell him to tie it back. He was floating like a buoy, his head hanging to one side. I shook his shoulder. He turned upside down. I saw he had been devoured from the waist down...’

The alarmed was deafening him. What was it? What was it!

‘The second night was worst than the first. Perhaps because there were fewer of us, the sharks seemed to be a lot more. There were only twenty of us left by the morning. There was so much dead meat floating around the sharks pretty much stopped bothering with the living. Although they took some bites now and then, perhaps because the living by that time reeked of blood and death.’

>>At midday, a fishing boat spotted us. I was never more afraid than in the last moments, waiting for my turn. I’ll never put on a life-jacket again...’

The alarm exploded. He got it.

‘Jaws! It’s Jaws!’ gasped the man in the water. ‘It’s from the movie!” he yelled, for once perfectly articulate.

‘Farewell and ado, you sweet Spanish ladies...’ mumbled the man on board with a smile.

‘Liar! Liar!’ he couldn’t tell whether he was mad with joy, because he had spotted the lie, or indignant because he was made to waste his time.

‘You don’t want to hear the rest of the story? You still haven’t found out when I lost my calf. Don’t you want to know how I almost die in St. Mary of the Flees and Ticks Hospital in Yemen because of the infection? How I needed four more operations when I returned to civilisation, only to be able to walk again? How I still wake up in pain because of what those Yemenite quacks did to me?’ The man on board was still smiling, but it was an expression that announced no good to the man in the water.

He didn’t care, he blocked his ears. It was a lie and he had spotted it.

‘Haven’t you thought I could have put this bits in to confuse you and send you off the track?’

The man in the water had considered it, yes, but he had immediately stumbled upon an inspiration that seemed to support his case that it was all baloney:

‘Where the trauma? He clattered.

The man on board kept smiling.

‘The human mind is a complicated thing.’

This is not an answer, babbled and rattled the man in the water. He is dodging the question, he thought. I’m right.

‘Third story!’ he shouted. He felt brave.

The man on board smiled and nodded as if he conceded defeat. That gesture was for the man in the water like a wedge between the solid brick wall of his cherished certainty. It’s been too easy, buzzed the alarm, too easy.

‘You’ll love the third story.’ said the man on board, smiling in a completely different way. The smile of a shark. ‘It’s about you.’

Warm Waters, Chapter 6

‘Alright then. The first story.’ The man on board contemplated the horizon. ‘Once upon a time, in a land far far away, there was this man who had a great love for the ocean. He had two children, a boy and a little girl. The mom was out of the picture. They were divorced. No, ‘he corrected himself, ‘she had died. The dad bought a boat. He took the kids to sail on weekends. This is how the boy learned the basics of seamanship, but more than anything this is how he acquired a taste for the sea.’

The man in the water stared intently at his face, trying to spot any signs of lie or truth. The captain spoke with a tone that seemed deliberately light, but his eyes were empty. One would say it felt as if the man took refuge from painful memories in a safe distance. But the man in the water heard some sort of alert signal inside. A little but stubborn voice was telling him not to trust anything he heard or saw.

‘One memorably hot august’, resumed the man on board ‘they went out to sea for the weekend. They sailed themselves right into a typhoon. The dad was just a weekend sailor. We sunk.’

The man in the water detected the change of person. In the face of the man on board he thought he saw the facial equivalent of that change.

‘We only had two life-vests. No, one life-vest.’ The man on board was speaking like a robot now. ‘Don’t ask me why we didn’t have one each. Ask my imbecile of a father. Anyway, perhaps because he thought she was too small for the life-vest and she’d lose it, or perhaps because he thought it was easier to hold on to her than to hold on to me, or perhaps because he loved me more, god knows –whatever the reason, he gave me the life-vest and tied her to himself, and him to me, with a dozen clumsy knots.

>>The waves towered over our heads until it seemed there was nothing else in the world but water. Sometimes we were carried over their backs, and had a terrifying view of an endless scape of furious waves that made us choke with horror; sometimes they broke on our heads and we were submerged to a depth were light was dimmed. I remember the life-vest pulling me towards the surface, while they dragged me down to the deep. I remember, when my lungs were about to burst and I thought we’d never surface, I remember how I wished they would just stop pulling me down.

>>I remember her screaming and weeping and coughing and choking. She was so scared. Thunder sounded like buildings collapsing. Lightning shrieked like the world was torn apart. Except when we were at the valley between two waves, when the wind ceased and there was a silence like death. How she cried and begged for it to stop. Papa, make it stop, she sobbed. I can only imagine what she felt after a wave like a house plumetted on top of us, and the shitty knots my dad made were untied, and she emerged –or perhaps she never did- and she was alone in the middle of that horror. I hope she drowned there and then, but maybe she didn’t, maybe she stood in the surface for a bit longer, lost, alone, hopeless, and so fucking scared it enrages me still when I think about it. We never saw her again.’ His eyes were beads of black glass. ‘They found me many hours later. The waters were very warm too, that day.’

Silence meant the man in the water heard the first breathing of the morning sea. It was like a distant crowd was hiding behind the line of the horizon.

‘So,’ blurted the man on board, light as a feather again, ‘do you believe this one?’ just like a movie actor that seems to wake up from a trance after he hears “cut!”. ‘It makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? It explains everything. A horrible sea-related trauma. This whole thing could be my attempt to understand my sister’s ordeal by having a stranger revive it. Or maybe I’m trying to sublimate my resentment against my father. What do you reckon?’

The man in the water was listening to his alarm, ringing madly after that playful speech. Don’t believe anything he says, said the alarm again. Find the notes of falsehood in the man's dettached, unaffected tone. Be suspicious, it buzzed. And nevertheless, he had felt compassion and empathised with the horrible story he had heard. He thought he had seen genuine suffering on his face, and guilt, and horror, in a complex blend that seemed just too convincing to ignore. He realised there and then the man was good. He realised there and then this could happen with each story he told him. He realised there and then he had agreed to a game of Russian Roulette, just as the man had said.

The man on board had been observing him all this time. Now he had the most hidious, malicious, homicidal smirk on his face. I know what you’re thinking, the smirk said, and it is exactly what I had always intended. You will not get out of this, said the smirk. We’ll have a nice time, telling stories and watching you hope and doubt, but in the end this will conclude precisely as I told you from the start it would conclude. You will die of cold in the middle of the ocean, you will never know why, and I will be here to see it happen.

‘Your father?’ rattled the man in the water. A sudden inspiration.

‘Oh, the old man.’ He . ‘I’ll give you two options’ he sounded cold as a razor blade. ‘The first one: My dad tied a rubbish knot for himself too. I’m an orfan, woe is me. Sometimes I toss and turn all night thinking that my dad did not want to survive my sister. I even wonder if he gave me the life-vest to tie her destiny to hers, because it was her he couldn’t bear to part with. She was lovely. I was not. My parents’ divorce, well, my mom’s death rather, caught me at a very bad age. I blamed him for everything. Just imagine how all that makes me feel. Do you still wonder why I do what I do?

>>Of course, it could all be bollocks. Imagine how many times I’ve recalled this. Every time you remember something, you alter that memory. It could be all my fucking imagination by now. Just don’t forget how sick I must be to be doing this to you.’ He paused. 'There is the second option, though. He did make it, we were both found. He became a drunk and we lost touch. Many years later, he became the first customer of this little game we’re playing right now. I thought I’d end that useless life. He was useless when my sister needed him, and he was useless when I needed him. But the old man’s death did nothing for me. There was not catharsis, no release. I felt the same fury and the same frustration and the same hatred and the same resentment. So I keep murdering strangers just to see if that will put an end to all this. Whenever I feel the urge, because you’re alone, or you piss me off, or just because you’re here, and I’m here, and the sea is here, I give it another go, and I hope that this time will be the one.’ The robotic, lifeless speech ended in a suspended note.

The man in the water felt an immense sadness. He was very cold, very cold. His head was aching, his muscles were exhausted. He couldn’t think straight. The man on board kept talking and talking and his hopes faltered, because everything that was said was deceitful and everything rang true. He was beginning no to care.

I am going mad, told the man in the water to himself. I am just going, he muttered.

‘What did you say?’ said the man on board.

‘Second story’ clattered the man in the water with painful difficulty and little conviction.

The man on board stared at him with empty black lifeless eyes.

‘Very well, then. The second story.’

Warm Waters, Chapter 5

He realised he had fallen asleep. It might have been no more than a minute. He woke with a start and a splash. Had he not been wearing the rubber suit, he might have gone down. How long had he slept? The sky was still black. A silver glimmer had been persistently lining the hem of the night to the east. It wasn’t much, but it was painting every contour in a paler shade than the background. He could see the silhouette of the boat almost as if it was traced in chalk.

‘I thought you were gone then’ said the man on board.

The man in the water was still recovering from the rush of blood of his deadly fright. He looked towards the face of the man on board with an odd expression. He realised that, for a moment, he hadn’t remembered where he was.

‘You look lost.’ said the man on board. ‘I think it’s started.’

The man in the water felt the stab of cold like a punch. He was ravenous and fiercely thirsty. He had his arms around himself and had to force them to stay close, or else they waived and wagged wildly. The muscles in his legs contracted painfully. He wanted to reply to the man on board. He wanted to say “no it hasn’t started. The trembling hasn’t stopped. My body hasn’t given up already”. But he doubted he could articulate more than a few words. And it was such a wretched shame. He had so many things to say. This is a miserable way to die, he wanted to say. And so absurd.

‘Why... you... doing this.’ he said instead. His jaw shook and sounded like the machines they use to drill the streets. His chest was aching.

‘If I haven’t told you yet, what makes you think I will now.’

Because this is the end, he thought. Because there’s nowhere to hide.

‘You... want... to.’ he dared him instead.

‘What if this is a hit?’ suggested the man on board. ‘What if somebody paid for this?’

He shook his head vehemently. He realised he only had to think about the movement and the inertia from trembling did the rest.

‘Personal. You. Me’ he said. This is personal, he meant.

The man on board smiled. It’s already clear enought to see him smiling, thought the man in the water.

‘So what have you done to me to deserve this.’ The man on water had a soft tone, almost gentle.

‘You... tell... me!’ The man in the water realised he was gargling rather than speaking. He could almost feel the sounds forming deep within his throat.

The man on board took that air about him, pondering, peripathetic, that the man in the water had begun to identify and crave. It made him think of an all professor wandering around the cloisters of an old building, his head down, deep inside some complex and beautiful thought. You can talk to an old professor. You can reason with him. An old professor has a soul.

‘Wouldn’t it be great if I had a reason. A childhood trauma, perhaps. Something I haven’t managed to overcome. Something you could perhaps try and help me with, help me get some kind of closure. Wouldn’t it be great that you and me could talk now, man to man, and resolve this.’ His rugged seaman’s hand rubbed his chin, his short, curly beard producing a sound crisp as a razor in the absolute silence of dawn.

The man in the water shook his head up and down. It would be great, he was saying. You can’t covey sarcasm with forceful nods, but even if he could, he wasn’t sure he’d wanted to.

The man on board looked towards the growing silver stripe on the horizon, still rubbing his chin.

‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do.’ He said at last. ‘Let’s play spot the trauma.’

The man in the water must have looked puzzled. The man on board elaborated.

‘I will tell you three stories.’ He explained. ‘And if you guess which one is true...’ he waivered for a second. ‘Yeah, why not,’ he told himself. ‘If you guess which one is true, I’ll get you out. I’ll reheat you and take you to land safe and sound. I’ll let you live.’

The man in the water must have looked positively suspicious, but nothing could deny his blood was rushing through his veins and something warm and cozy had started to bring a sort of life to his exhausted limbs. You could call it adrenaline, or even hope.

‘Do you accept?’ said the man on board, rather unnecessarily.

The man in the water was looking for the catch, until he realised it was absurd. What do I have to lose?, he told himself. He nodded forcefully again.

The man on board smiled broadly and warmly. Bathed in that bone-white light of dawn, he looked like a spectre.

‘Alright then. The first story.’

Warm Waters, Chapter 4

Perhaps he rushed it. It was dark as if there was no morrow. It was almost impossible to make out the contours of the boat against the black sky. He hadn’t heard a human noise coming from the boat in ages. And if all of that wasn’t reassuring enough, he realised his strength was deserting him fast, and his will power, like rats off a sinking boat. He couldn’t wait any longer. He’d had to take his chances now.

He took the knife out of the sheath attached to his leg. His bare hand glowed under the water with a ghostly, greenish radiance. The knife was black as a tear in the fabric of reality. His movements were slow, careful, self-conscious. He didn’t trust his hands. He stuck the knife between his jaws to stop the clatter. He stuck the snorkel in the waist of his rubber suit, so that it wouldn’t be in the way. He left the mask dangling from the rubber band around his neck. He couldn’t do with having his vision impaired. Perhaps he made a mistake not attempting to approach under water. He told himself he needed to keep his head above water, literally, and be able to see and hear as much as he could. He told himself he’d produce a big splash as he dived and that would not do. What he didn’t dare to admit to himself is that the reason why he wouldn’t dive is because he was scared to death of the black waters. He couldn’t stuff his head, much less hiw whole body in them. He feared he’d lose sight of where the surface was. He’d feared the fear he knew would clamp him if he looked into the water and see nothing. So he thrusted himself forward with the flippers, very slowly, his arms stretched out in front of him, breaking the waves like a ship’s bow. He covered the dozen braces between him and the boat faster than he had expected, as if the currents had changed to help him. His heart was pounding so hard he thought the booming of the beating would travel through the water easily and reach the ears of the man on board. One last impulse and he’d touch the metal frame of the wooden platform at the stern. He wavered for the briefest of seconds. Once he gained that length he’d have to fight for his life. He’d have to drive his knife in another man’s flesh. He could see in his mind the blood pouring on his hands. That warm blood. Warmth. He paddled forcefully. His hand reached not for a boat, not for revenge, but for warmth. He grabbed the platform.

BANG!

An explosion like a cannon and a splash one inch to his right. The man in the water was shaken so hard his hand had let go. The knife fell from his mouth. It got entangled in the rubber band of the mask and he held it.

So it was a gun after all.

The engine coughed and stuttered. His hand made a last loyal stand and clutched the platform again without him having to will it, just as the engine started. The boat started forward like water pouring from a dam. He felt the sea closing around him like a tomb and pulling him back. He struggled to keep hold of the boat that moved away as inevitably as a continent. For a second he thought he would make it. Then the strength deserted his hand and he saw in despair his fingers loosening their grip, no matter how hard he willed them to endure. He heard a groan emerging from his throat as if it was from somebody else’s. The hand let go and stayed in front of him like a dead thing. The sea released him like an evil force had been conjured. The boat got further and further away. For a second he thought it would keep going and he’d be left completely alone in the middle of the ocean, and he almost felt yearning. The engine quieted down and the boat stopped. The silhouette of the man on board appeared leaning on the push pit.

The man in the water felt the cold in his body returning like a curtain had been lifted. All his willpower and his drive deserted him. He was stunned, no feeling and no thought left in him. The ring in his ear from the gunshot rised and rised and then quieted.

With his hands trembling with absurdly wide and comparatively slow movements, like a Parkinson patient, he struggled to fit the knife back in the sheath and just about succeeded. It took him what felt like an hour. He had to plan and execute each gesture with deliberation. He didn’t ask himself what he needed the knife for anymore. Nor did he ask himself why did he need anything else at all, why not get out of that ice cold rubber suit, and float on his back, and forget about that story and every story, for ever.

Instead, he pulled the rubber so that it would cover as much of his body as possible (his hands like rubber as well, with very little grip), and embraced himself. He stared into that narrow, silver stripe of clarity on the eastern horizon.

Warm Waters, Chapter 3

When your eyes are so close to the water’s surface you can’t distinguish the path of light the setting sun burns on the horizon. If you look towards the west, all you see is light. The man in the water had his face in the sea, with his glasses and snorkel, pointing to where the sun fired up the ocean. The water in that direction was a jadish green, as if the bottom was close and made out of golden sands. White particles swam and flew all around him in a timeless dance that took his mind away. It was comforting. The man in the water wanted to keep soothing his eyes and his thoughts in that gorgeous green world that wrapped him and felt almost warm.

To the east, the water was already inking blue, reflecting the night that was already rising. Over his head, a nail-thin moon was suspended in a sky that was still pale. The evening star was already shining. Just where the night sky met the sea, there was a mysterious silver stripe made out of the spectral light of the stars reflected on the ocean. The man in the water feared that sight, and he feared the lead-grey sea underneath it, which was advancing from the night he feared to devour him. Once the sun had set, sea and sky would appear as one single nothingness, and then the nightmares of ravenous beasts emerging from the unthinkable abyss beneath him would turn from ridiculous to horrific.

He had been trying to ignore the atrocious trembling of his limbs for quite a while now. He knew they announced something he just could not bear to face. He was very cold. His teeth rattled with a mechanical constancy, completely oblivious to his will. It was as if his body was starting to abandon him. That’s how he felt: abandoned, unable to trust his own flesh, something he had always taken for granted. He had been going over the years of the French Revolution, matching names of countries with their capital cities. He checked the state of his mind. He realised that, once the confusion set in, it would mean that the countdown had began. But would he notice the first signs of his mind fleeting. Does the madman know he is going mad.

The sun had set. He took his face off the water. There was still clarity but the sea was dark. It was fearsome to look at. The man in the water looked to the boat. He met the eyes of the man on board. A strange greenish, silvery light surrounded them.

‘It must be scary out there’, said the man on board. ‘Are you scared?’

‘I’m dead scared.’ The man in the water struggled with his teeth that brattled like a shotgun.

‘I thought you might be. And are you cold?’ inquired clinically the captain.

‘I’m dead cold’ clattered the man in the water.

‘Not yet.’ said the man on board. ‘Is your mind going yet?’

‘No.’

‘It will soon. Not long now. I don’t think you’ll survive the night, even though this water is still stupidly warm.’

‘Stupidly.’ Clackety-clack.

‘You’ve got the word “scheme” written across your face.’ declared the captain.

‘What?’

‘A scheme, a plan, a strategy. You haven’t made your peace yet. You still think this cannot be the end of you. You’re waiting for your chance. Let me guess: you’ll wait until it’s pitch black. You’ll wait until no sounds have come from the boat for a while. You’ll put on your mask and snorkel, and you’ll swim as quietly as you can over here. You’ll climb up the platform and you’ll jump on top of me with your knife. Isn’t that exactly what you’re planning?’

The silence of the man in the water spoke volumes.

‘Not that I’m a mentalist, mind you. It’s just that, what else is there for you to try?’ The man on board sipped his can of soda carelessly. ‘I bet you think it’s a stupid question, but do yourself a favour and consider it for a second: have you though this through? I’m sure you’ve been tossing and turning it in your brain for hours, with your face in the water staring into oblivion, but, is it smart? Think about it. What are your chances? What are the chances of me really allowing that to happen? Do you reckon I will get tired and sloppy?’

The man in the water saw the man on board as a silhouette, a cut out in the dim yellow light on the cockpit. That small lamp cast more shadows than light. He couldn’t see the face of the man on board; he couldn’t read his serene, monotone voice.

‘Having said that, once you lay down on the bench and start gazing at the stars, and your brain tunes into the beating swoosh of the waves against the keel, your attention does slip off, your will waivers. Isn’t that what you found so interesting in the bottom of the sea a while ago? How it sucks you into a place where this situation, you and me and this petty murder, just stops being a matter of any importance? Is it then so senseless to think that I might be distracted when you try to approach? Or that I will hear you and ignore you? That my impulse will falter? Why not make it more interesting then.’


GRRANNNG! A peel and a splash. The man in the water jumped.

‘There you go. I lowered the ladder. Do you think you can make it that far? Even if I did hear you coming, I might not manage to start this old thing quickly enough. You heard it struggle this morning, an age of the world ago. And it is so dark out there. If you dived, I might just lose you completely. You could take me by surprise, appear where I don’t expect you. You might even have enough strength left in you to jump on the boat and on to my neck. Adrenaline works miracles. And motivation. Because this is true: this might be your last chance. If you think you’re cold now, imagine how cold you will be by dawn. If you are alive by then, that is.’

The man in the water shook violently in his alien, trembling flesh. A voice inside of him screamed, “of course I’ll be alive!”

‘Motivation, then, is something to take into account.’ continued the man on board. ‘But I had thought of that already.’

CRRRC! A rattle with a metallic echo, sharp as a blade. The man in the water gave a start.

‘You recognised this sound, didn’t you? You’ve heard it before in a million films. But wait a minute!’ The man on board took a theatrical tone. ‘Wait a minute! Did you hear it right? Is it a gun? How do you know what a gun sounds like in real life? I could be teasing you. Haven’t I been toying with you all day? Couldn’t it be some nautical shit? Or a rattle? Or a fucking nutcracker? Hell, for all you know, it could be fucking anything! Do you know the only way you have to find out what this is? Well, come closer and I’ll shoot you. I dare you. Perhaps it’s worth it though. People have been known to survive even a shot in the brain. I don’t know anybody who survived long enough to lead a boat back to port and get himself to a hospital, but who knows. And I might not even get your head. I might miss you altogether. And I may not want to shoot you anyway. Am I not obsessed with seeing you freeze to death after all? You’ve got a lot going for you, my friend. It might just be worth a try after all. So the question remains the same.’ A dramatic pause. ‘How insane am I. What am I doing. Why am I doing it. Why am I doing it to you. If only you knew more about all this, you might be able to take an informed decision. But you don’t. So as it is, whatever you decide is like taking a shot at a Russian Roulette. And all I have to do is watch.’

The words of the man on board circled round his head like a swarm of bees. He could almost see them, hear them buzz. He had an overpowering impulse to shake his hand in the air to disperse them. Instead, he let the white hot flow of hatred and fury warm him up, and bring life and strength to his wrinkly, cadaverous limbs. On that beautiful moment, he believed that hatred had made him invincible. He had absolutely no doubt at all he would survive to break the gloating in that man’s voice.

‘You want to kill me’ said the man on board, slowly, as if he was deciphering the waves of anger emanating from the man in the water through the salty darkness. ‘You might even think you would be able to do it, if you could have the chance. But it’s not easy, you know?, to kill a human being. You have to mean it. You have to mean it a lot.’

Warm Waters, Chapter 2

2.
Noon. Water still felt warm.

‘Why are you doing this?’ said the man in the water, not really talking to the man on board. He felt a surge of rage. ‘What have I ever done to you? I don’t even know you!’ he spashed.

‘Ah, a reason’ said the man on board, smiling in a way that made the man in the water feel very small. ‘There has to be a reason. It can’t just be random. You can’t be dying by chance!’ Sarcasm oozing. He proceeded almost philosophically. ‘A reason can be as good as a rope to cling on to.’ he said. ‘But listen, listen to me.’ The man on board leaned outwards, confidencially. ‘Consider this for a moment. What if there really is no reason? There may not even be a plan. You jumped on the boat, you decided to go swimming, and when I see you swimming back, it just pops up in my head: “what if he never gets back on?” You haven’t thought of that, have you? No, of course not. Because that would be so unfair. If you’re going to die of cold in the middle of the ocean, there better be a good fucking reason for it!’

The man in the water had stopped paddling and waving his hands around to control the floating. There was a deep wrinkle between his eyebrows. He hadn’t even thought of all of this, not really.

‘So, just for the sake of argument,’ continued the man on board, ‘let’s say there is a reason. Let’s say I picked you. Let’s even say I’ve spent the whole morning putting in your brain the idea of jumping off my boat in the middle of nowhere. Let’s say there is a plan. Maybe if you think really hard, you’ll find out what it is. And wouldn’t that be helpful. That you could, shall we say, reach me;’ such an ugly sarcasm in the word “reach”, ‘that you could understand what I’m doing, or why am I doing it to you. Wouldn’t that give you some leverage, perhaps even a chance?’ The man on board stared intently to the man in the water for a minute in silence. Then he turned his back to him, leaned forward, grabed a can of beer from the coolbox under the bench near him.

The other man was looking at his hands, distorted and turned white, almost fluorescent, by the thin layer of water above them. They looked like raisins. They’d soon start to turn blue.

‘It would make more sense, wouldn’t it’ continued the man on board, staring into space. ‘It would be a relief. That you deserved this somehow.’ The man on board sipped his beer. ‘There are days when I feel that we all deserve to die a cruel death for something, you know. But if we all deserve this, then in a way none of us do.’ The man on board reclined on the cockpit bench and disappeared.

Warm Waters, Chapter 1

WARM WATERS, A STORY

He felt the cold, black, lifeless eyes of the man on board over him.

‘No more begging?’ he gloated.

‘What would be the point’, spat the man in the water.

It had taken him hours to realise the man on board was serious. At first he just couldn’t believe this was happening to him. The absurdity of it all exasperated him and enraged him until all he could see was red. The situation was dead simple: he had rented a weekend fishing trip to the island. Halfway there he had had the whim of swimming right where there was no land to be seen. He had put on his scuba diving suit and diver’s knife out of snobbery, because the waters were at a stupidly warm temperature and he couldn’t think of one single reason he might need the knife; he had put on his flippers in case currents were stronger than they appeared, and his mask and snorkel out of habit. And after he had done his splashes, and dived, and laid on his back under the sun, and felt connected to the secret soul of the planet and all that, he had tried to swim back to the boat. At that point the man on board steered the trawler away from him. And when he tried to approach it again, he steered away again. Just a few braces each time, keeping always within a tantalisingly close distance. Not close enough for him to reach, but not so far that it seemed completely pointless trying. He had exhausted himself falling into that again and again, and getting furious, shouting, cursing and begging, not necessarily in that order, and getting no results, not even a word. Now he was determined not to be fooled again, to keep calm and resolve this problem. He started reviewing in his head the dangers and the opportunities. He had been scanning the sea around without realising.

‘You’re thinking, “somebody will turn up soon”, aren’t you’, said the man on board. ‘You’re thinking, “This is a route towards an island. People need supplies in an island. A cargo boat or the frigging milk sailor man will go by at some point and see me, and then I’ll be saved.” Isn’t that what you’re thinking?’

He felt like an insect studied through a lens, the glare of the man on board a bright laboratory light peering through his transparent body. Yes, that thought had put his mind at ease for an instant. Why was the man on board so untroubled by this possibility? Did ships really take that route? Was there anything he didn’t know? He couldn’t stand that glare.

‘I’m thinking whether I should cut your throat with the knife, or is it better if I strangle you? Or should I push you overboard and watch you drown?’ He tried to sound every bit as threatening as the man on board. He realised he was overdoing it.

The man on board coughed a void, cruel chuckle.

‘That’s not what you’re thinking.’ he said, and he lay back again, disappearing behind the gunwale line. The man in the water knew he was reclining on the cushioned bench in the cockpit where he himself had been sitting a couple of hours ago, taking the sights in, the salty breeze in his face, feeling alive.

What are my most pushing problems?, pondered the man in the water. About four hours away north, four hours by boat of course, stood the island were he had been headed. Right now its waters must be swarming with happy, fat tourists, diving to look at the fish, and taking pictures of themselves next to giant bivalves; they would be shipped off on shark spotting safaris. They would take pictures with their disposable, 24-snapshots, waterproof Kodaks. He could have been one of them, but he would have looked down on them. After all, he was an experienced diver; he had been to the Great Coral Reef and to the Maldives. Why in the world had he wanted to go to that blooming island in the first place? Why had he wanted to swim in the middle of the fucking sea? He was seeing red again. He took a deep breath.

Four hours southwards was the continent. How much could it take to get there by swimming? It seemed like a lot. I have to save my strength, paddle slowly, he told himself. He put on his diving mask and snorkel and floated belly down. There was nothing to be seen, no sandy shallows, no rocky reefs, just the deep blue abyss. He felt his breathing pace rushing as his eyes followed the white, straight stripes of light that pierced the waters ever downwards, deeper and deeper, in an angle that converged hundreds and hundreds of braces between his body and the earth, pointing at a cold, dark place where nightmarish creatures fed on the dead things that fell from the world of light in the surface, like himself. Vertigo overtook him. He took his head out of the water, realising his heart was in his throat, and that he could easily have panicked, swallowed water and gotten into trouble. When he looked to the boat, the man on board was staring. His eyes lifeless and black, a doll’s eyes. He thought he saw hatred or disdain in the wrinkle that twisted ever so slightly his upper lip, but he could be wrong. He felt again studied like a lab rat.

‘What are you staring at, you sick fuck?’ he groaned.

The man on board didn’t change his hieratic expression one bit.

‘You know you could freeze to death in this water?’ he said. ‘25 degrees Celsius, reaching perhaps 27 at high noon; like a bathtub, you said it yourself, and still you could die of cold out there, if you stay in long enough. That is, if you don’t get a cramp and drown. As you get colder, your heart will beat faster. The trembling will start. Moderate at first, then more and more violent, until your hands are all but useless. When your internal temperature drops under 35, you’ll start to die. Heartbeat will start to slow down, so will your breathing. The trembling burns oxygen and puts stress on your heart. You’ll feel confused. At that point, if nothing is done to warm you up, death could occur in less than two hours. Some sort of process involving lactic acid. At 33 degrees, your conscience will be completely clouded. Under 32, the trembling will stop, you’ll piss yourself, you’ll go into a state of stupor and then coma. At 27 you’ll appear dead. You’ll lose even your reflexes. Under 25 your body functions will collapse. People have been revived from a starting temperature as low as 15 degrees Celsius. But these were people who were immerged in water near to freezing point. That is not you.’

The man in the water had listened to all that in a state of increasing horror and disbelief.

‘Are you trying to kill me?’ he said, a burning knot in his stomach.

‘I am already succeeding’ said the man on board.

‘But... what is your fucking problem?’ whispered the man in the water, terror choking his voice.

A small, horrible smile curved the left end of the mouth of the man on board.

‘I believe the problem is all yours.’ he said.

Warm Waters (four words)

This one has been on my mind for quite a while. It was originally written simply as a dialogue, then turned into a script for a short film that I hope will be shot in the summer of 2010. This story means a lot to me. It is the first piece of fiction I managed to write in ages, it was my idea from start to finish, and I happen to like it quite a lot as a script. Let's see how it fares as a tale.

It deals with technical stuff (hypothermia and nautical terms) and I'm bound to make mistakes that will jump in the face of some readers (if I get any). Please excuse my ignorance and take a minute to pull my ears and enlighten me, if you please.

As always, I'll drop in the usual excuse of English not being my native language to try and get away with any literary miscarriages in the prose.

The Kennels, Chapter 7 (Finale)

7.

Sitting on one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs of the ER, waiting for his name to be called, he told himself he would go to the kennels the following day and confront these people. He was thinking of the anguish and despair on the woman’s face when she realised her plan to get help wouldn’t work, and that she was alone with her problems and with the men who profited from it once again.

Tom went home with seven stitches on the back of his head, the area feeling blissfully numb thanks to the superficial anesthetics he had been given. He felt determined and rage made him brave. A few hours later, the effects of the anesthetics had worn off, the stitches pulled and the area throbbed. The dressing bulged and every time he turned in bed it reminded him of what had happened. He was unable to sleep. In the morning he had a hammering migraine. He couldn’t even open his eyes without a moan. He took everything he had been prescribed until his belly rattled, and laid in bed telling himself there was no way he could get up and face the people at Ickfield. He spent all day in bed, in the dark, trying to sleep. Every time he heard a car outside he gave a start, his pulse rushed wild and his forhead pearled with sweat.

On Monday he dragged himself to the office, still with the migraine’s hangover and a bandage on his head to explain. He said he had tripped in the shower, and yes he was alright, and no he didn’t rather go home thank you. He said he couldn’t stay another day in bed. He didn’t say he felt safer among people. When it was time to leave he felt an almost overpowering urge to ask Jack if he could crash in his settee. He then remembered Jack’s wife’s obsessions with chicken broth and how very much attentive she could be with recovering patients, and he decided to risk his own place after all.

He unlocked his door that evening with a shudder. The door opened like a mouth to a place that was dark, quiet and unwelcoming, full of corners and hiding places where desperate, evil men could be lurking from that very second. When he locked the door behind him, the warm, yellow lights of the streetlamps were locked out with it. He switched on every light as he moved around the house, and left them on. He looked at every window with a shiver. How accessible his house was, how easy to break into. He wouldn’t see a marauder in his back garden until the trespasser’s nose was stuck to the French doors’ glass. Would the neighbours do something. Would they stay put and ignore the noises, like they did, like he himself did, that time when a group of teenagers smashed a car’s window and drove away with it, the alarm booming, the boys laughing. Wasn’t his home supposed to be a sanctuary. Should a sanctuary have bars on every window. Should he have gotten another dog. He was sitting on the settee, the telly on mute, looking at the dining chairs and wondering if they would make a good barricade. He felt ridiculous and cried. Out of the corner of his eye he had seen Baloo’s leash still hanging from the rack in the hall. He had left it there and stopped seeing it after a while. Tonight it flashed, silver and red, and made Tom feel incredibly lonely.

On Tuesday he looked like a racoon –he hadn’t slept a wink, again-, and his workmates struggled not to insist for him to go home. Tom didn’t feel half as bad as he looked, but he allowed them to believe it. By noon the boss told him go home Tom really. He accepted, smiling tiredly, sheepishly. He didn’t go home though. He headed for Ickfield instead. He didn’t phone the police. He wouldn’t have known what to say.

He turned at Touchwood Lane into Ickfield Road and he smelt it. Smoke. He could even smell how black and thick it was. Then he saw it, like a dark, ominous tower climbing over the trees, a tongue of flame licking its walls every now and then. He heard it. It creeped and thrummed like war drums, like an army of insects. The bulging belly of the grey clouds was tainted rust red, like old, dry blood. He heard the sirens and saw the orange and blue flashes of the police and the firemen.

He got to the beginning of the bumpy private road leading to the kennels. A young police constable walked towards the middle of it to stop him from going further. Tom jumped out of the car, looking upwards, mesmerised by the flames he could finally see, although he coulnd’t see the buildings because the meandering road flanked with trees disguised them.

‘There is a fire, sir, you can’t get through.’ said the young PC, stating the obvious. ‘You need to move your car.’

Tom only half listened to him. He was drawn to the fire like a moth. The PC stood right in front of him and thrusted his hands forward. Another step and he’d grab Tom’s arms.

‘Sir! You can’t get through. Move your car now, please.’

Tom stopped. He looked at the PC for the first time. He looked a bit out and the PC wondered if he was on something. He saw the dressing at the back of his head and drew a few mistaken conclusions. Wondered if he had to caution him about driving under the influence.

‘What about the owners?’ was all Tom said.

‘There was nobody in, that we know of.’

Tom was puzzled. He accepted to remove the car. He stayed by the road, waiting for new developments. He wondered whether there were any dogs left in there, roasting, but didn’t ask. He didn’t want to know the answer.

It took hours before the firemen declared the fire extinct. By then a little crowd had gathered and there was mess and confusion. The young PC was overpowered, and before reinforcements arrived, Tom had already gone through, crossing the fields, to examine the wreck with his own eyes. The long flat house was a ruin. Only the stone foundations had survived. The roof had collapsed and the wood frame was gone. Perhaps the firemen had pushed in a few walls, making some furniture topple, because there were objects scattered outside the house like a very off sort of flotsam. The cells compound was blackened, the metal grids flagging like a windless sail, the metal shed deformed by heat. Behind the compound, the woods had become an ink illustration in a book of Gothic tales. Tom walked towards it. Nobody stopped him.

There was a feverish, sickening heat radiating from the ground. The burnt undergrowth cracked and broke as he walked through it. Twice he heard thundering and realised it was some big old tree falling over. He realised he could be crushed. He ignored it. He realised he could be poisoned with the smoke. He put a handkechief to his mouth when he started coughing and kept walking. He reached the stream. The long planks of wood where two thinned bars of coal. He descended the four feet towards the water dragging on his back, wetted his hands and face and handkerchief with the drip of water still running in the stream, climbed the four feet of red clay with protruding, untouched roots that fed no living thing anymore. He didn’t think twice about his suit. He rushed forward without realising when he saw the hill. He walked around it like last time. There it was, the clearing.

The ancient, twisted oaks were still standing. A few younger, twiggy trees had fallen off, making the clearing wider. On the ground, the things, the lichens, the meat flowers were blackened, smoky bulges, like burnt jacket potatoes, whistling, an odd purring noise emerging from deep inside them. Tom felt once again about to be sick. Under a thick veil of fungish-like smell, and smoke and ashes, one could feel the stench of burnt flesh. However, the growths and shapes that would appear in Tom’s nightmares for years to come were unrecognisable. He realised there was no way he would convince anyone that the thing two feet away from where he stood had been a dog’s head, with eyes and teeth and the suggestion of hair, like a half-formed horror, the foetus of an entity Tom would forever more try to ignore and forget, a thing existing in this world he could not explain, and that he feared.

When he read on the local newspaper the police was quite sure the fire had been provoked, and that it had started in the woods, Tom wasn’t surprised. When he didn’t hear a word about the things in the clearing, he was suspicious. When rumours appeared about the owners disappearing with a large amount of cash, he wasn’t so sure. He wondered if it was true. He wondered whether Mr. Ickfield would forgive Mrs. Ickfield for burning the chicken with the golden eggs. He wondered what would happen with the puppies from Ickfield, those weird animals who had come out of thin air, and might propagate a hybrid species of god knows what, with god knows what consequences. And he hoped he would stop some day waking up in the dead of night, with his pulse rushing, because he had dreamed of Baloo’s red eyes glaring at him from the end of the flower of flesh, twisting and screeching because it was being burnt alive.

THE END.

The Kennels, Chapter 6

6.

Dry lips. Tang of blood. Occlusion in his brain. Eyes will only open a glitch. The world is blurred and there is a gravestone on his forehead, or a hammer. Feels the back of his head. A burning hammer struck and a dry crust that must be blood. If somebody tries to hurt me now, I’m helpless, I’m done for, I can’t lift a finger. His throat is so dry he feels an acute pierce when he attempts to swallow. He slowly rises up to a sitting position and experiments with opening his eyes wider. Where am I. Stench of dog and stale dog food. And mud. The kennels. He feels the ground around him. A little clang when he bangs something with his fingernails. A metal water bowl. He feels like a blind man, wets up his fingers, licks them, then wets them up again, rubs his eyes. He drinks. He freshens up his face, his throbbing forehead. He opens his eyes. There is an evening dim, warm light. He is a muddy yard surrounded by a low concrete wall, crowned with a tall metal grid. He is leaning against a wooden box with a blooming dog flap in it. He really doesn’t want to turn his head around –the fear of the pain he might feel paralyses him- so he slowly crawls to his knees and turns his whole body around, to get a look behind him. The door to the passageway between the cells is secured with a heavy chain and padlock. He feels like shouting “if this is a joke it isn’t funny” but it dawns on him as clear as day that this in no joke and that the situation is critical. He has been assaulted, knocked out and locked up in a fucking dog cell. He is a prisoner, and that padlock is big enough to dispel any suggestions of humour.

‘Oil! Anyone!’ he screeches, his throat still feeling like sandpaper, his heart pounding, his stomach burning. ‘Hello!’

Nothing. The usual disturbing noiselessness of the kennels.

‘Hello! Somebody!’ The second screech is even screechier.

Shouting makes his headache wake up and throb with fury. He can’t keep up anymore. He leans to one side and ends up with his face on the mud. It’s cold and it feels good.

It feels like ages of lying there, unable to move or keep his eyes open. Then he hears the padlock and chain and opens his eyes temptingly. It’s nigh time and it’s dark, the only light is the residual clarity created by the stadium lights at the entrance of the kennels, fifty yards away. He makes out a silhouette approaching him, then the feel of a firm grip on his shoulder and a shake.

‘Are you awake, Mr. Everton?’ It’s a woman’s voice. Tom struggles to focus. ‘Get up. Hold onto me. Hold onto me Mr. Everton. That’s it, good lad. Push up now, hold on. We’re walking.’

Tom leans heavily on the woman, stronger than she looks, and is half-carried half-dragged along the passageway between the cells, through the metal shed and into the long flat house. He is taken to the lavatory and sat down on the toilet, where the woman has already set out a sink full of warm water and a couple of cloths. She cleans his wound and his face and gives him tablets. Tom shrugs off them

‘Paracetamol, Mr. Everton.’ She says.

He takes them. She sounds reassuring.

‘What’s going on?’ Tom takes the second cloth and rubs his face and his eyes. It’s soothing.

‘They found you in the forest. They know you know. You need to get out of here before they come back and tell the government what’s going on! This has to stop!’ She has stopped washing him and instead is standing there rubbing his hands together in anguish.

‘What is going on? What needs to stop?’

‘The flowers! The meat flowers in the forest! All those puppies coming out of nowhere! I thought you’d understand better than me. What kind of a scientist are you anyway?’

‘An engineer.’

‘An engineer? But you said you worked at the hospital!’

‘I said I had done work for a hospital.’

She went pale.

‘So you don’t know what is going on?’

‘No more than you.’ Tom got slowly on his feet. ‘Where is my stuff?’

‘They took it all.’

‘My camcorder?’

‘Your camera, your mobile, everything. They went to get rid of it. Then they wanted to get rid of you! They think you are a scientist and that you’re going to tell the whole world about this place and those things in the forest! You need to go now.’

‘You told miss Alastair how to find me, didn’t you? You told her I’d be interested.’

‘I thought you were a scientist!’ she moaned. ‘I thought you’d be able to stop all this! And now what!’ She was in despair. ‘You need to go now. I’m sorry about getting you in this mess. Leave, now! They’ll be back soon!’

‘I’m going to the police, lady.’

‘Try if you want. They have never believed me or given a toss about dogs being impregnated with spores! Now, leave, please!’

Tom took the blanket she offered and accepted to be lead to a back exit. He found himself facing the muddy fields again and wondering if he’d manage to find his way in the dark. Hell, would his car be there? His knees were wobbly and his head still throbbed. Still he crossed the field, arrived to a fence and recognised the crossroad. He had to walk southwards half a mile.

He heard a car behind him. A flash of instinct told him to duck. The big tank-like muddy Jeep he used to park next to when he left his dog at the kennels. The owner and the guy in the black paste glasses where in it. They went passed where he was with a roar of thunder. Tom was glad to have ducked and believed he hadn’t been found out.

He stumbled and limped the half a mile towards his car, driven by sheer terror. He believed they were capable of everything the woman had said. His car was there, thank god. Would he be able to drive. His heart was pounding like explosions in a deep mine and his stomach burning with fear as he drove past the kennels’ gate. He breathed deeply when he reached the main road. At the first lay-by he had to stop, step out of the car and vomit. They would have killed me, he thought, blinded with fear. He had jumped into that situation merrily, without a real clue of what was at stake and what might be the consequences. He realised these men would not just let him off that easily. He wasn’t safe. He did not know what to do. He ha had gotten himself in deep shit. To think that just a few hours ago he had felt exhilarated and happy. What an idiot he had been. What was done was done. But what now?

The Kennels, Chapter 5

5.

After a quarter of a mile plodding across the muddy field, Tom’s excitement started to dwindle. He left the herd of cows to his left, looking like tears of blackness in the dark. He didn’t dare to switch on his light, fearing being spotted, and looked at the stadium-like lights for guidance as he would a lighthouse. He stepped more than once in a hole and more than once he was sucked in by a pool of wet mud that refused to let him out without a struggle. When he got to the kennels’ compound Tom had become a part of the landscape, caked with dirt and turf. His feet were as heavy as lead and in his mouth the metal taste of excitement mixed with that of clay. He could only hope his camcorder had escaped the mud bath.

Some twenty steps away from the metal fence surrounding the kennels, Tom stopped, got rid of his muddy gloves and took out his camcorder. He swept across the kennels with the night vision function activated. He saw no movement and heard no sound. Not even from the dogs. A thick green plastic covered the metal fences from the outside. Tom approached the dogs' cells and cut a hole in the plastic with his Swiss knife. He examined a few cells. They all seemed empty. It could be that the dogs were in their boxes and were not interested in Tom. In any case, what would Tom gain if he found out whether the cells were occupied or not? After surveying most cells on that side of the kennels, he felt exasperated. What was he doing? What did he expect to find? What was he doing there?

He sat down on a bail of straw, feeling stupid. He sat there for a long while, refusing to leave and without reasons to stay, wondering what to do next. And then that shriek. One lone dog started howling and gasping. It didn’t stir a reaction in the other dogs, if there were any. It came from the cell closest to the woods at the east end of the compound. Tom rushed there, cut a whole in the plastic. There was an Alsatian in the middle of the enclosure, lying on his side, moaning and gasping for air. And then Tom felt the smell. A repulsive, overpowering smell of damp and decay, like a moist basement that’s been shut for years, a smell that didn’t linger in the air but seemed to be suddenly casting on him like a flush of water from a hose. He couldn’t breath. He dropped on his knees, fondled with his pack bag clumsily, felt for his first aid kit. He struggled with the toggle, then with the plastic box. He took some strips of bandage and sprayed them with water and spirit and pressed them to his nose and mouth. Slowly he rose and stepped away from the forest and the moaning dog. As suddenly as it started, the smell stopped between three and four steps away from the cell. Tom sat on the grass, recovering. He realised now his little expedition had not been in vain. There was something very wrong with this place.

He rubbed the wet bandages over his face and hands, feeling better. And then he heard the sound of disturbed vegetation coming from the forest. He sprayed on the floor, belly down, blessing the darkness. A person emerged from the woods, wearing a surgical mask and gloves and covered with a plastic cape with a hood, and holding a long cane. He approached the metal shed that stood on that side of the compound, similar to the one in the other end. A couple of nails were stuck under the overhanging roof of the shed, on which the hooded person hung his cape and mask. It was the bloke with the black paste glasses. He unlocked the shed’s door, which was a passageway into the compound, and walked away. Tom waited in exhilaration before he dared to put his head up. Only then he realised the dog had stopped its howling. Tom stuck his eye in the tear he had cut before in the plastic, and saw the dog in what appeared to be a deep sleep.

The woods, Tom said to himself. The key to all this is in the woods. He took the mask and cape and entered the forest. He stumbled into many fallen trees, the head of roots suspended in mid air like some fossilised mythological beast. Undergrowth and stingy branches seemed to strive to arrest his progress. His lamplight cast more shadows than light. He wasn’t sure if he was following a path. And then he felt the stench again, certain as a searchlight, guiding him eastwards. He followed it across a little stream and around a hill. It led him to a crater-shaped clear amidst the tortured branches of three old oaks. He stopped, searched around with his lamplight. Turned the camcorder on, swept with the nocturnal vision. There were strange growths in the ground, lichen like shapes. Through the camera they looked dead white and ectoplasm green. He switched it off and scanned them with the lamplight. They were the weirdest, biggest lichens or fungi he had ever seen. He couldn’t even remember seeing things like that in nature documentaries. And perhaps it was the yellow light of the lamp, but they were rosy in colour, even fleshy. He crouched and tried to look closer. The edges of the fleshy petal things were darker, almost red, and it gave the things the appearance of pig’s ears on the countertop of a family butcher’s. He couldn’t bring himself to touch them, and he actually took one step back so that he wouldn’t stand on them. They felt like treading on a pile of meat. He scanned the whole area again. The fungi covered a good ten square metres. Some fungi stood almost two feed high. Tom pointed the lamplight at the closest one. He gasped. It could not be. What in the world was that? It looked almost, it was very similar to, oh my god, it’s exactly like...

He felt an explosion at the back of his neck and started to fall. He still had time to thing that the weird, horrible fungi looked exactly like a dogs head. He was unconscious before his face touched the ground.

The Kennels, Chapter 4

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

The Kennels, Chapter 3

3.

Tom felt like being sick.
‘But it can’t be! It has eyes, and these are... teeth?’
‘Yes, teeth. And these are ears, and these here, legs’ said the man, as Tom traced the shapes in the screen with the tip of his finger, as if he needed to point at them to understand them.
‘But wasn’t your dog a male?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘But... these are...’
‘Yes sir, puppies.’
‘Puppies!’ Tom had a hard time reconciling those scrambled shapes with the furry, sweet, cute balls of hair that usually spring to mind when one hears the word ‘puppy’.
‘I was gobsmacked, I tell you. The thing is, you see, when he opened them... Well, he said they were tumours after all, with a... how did he put it? A whimsical shape. But he said they were definitely not faetuses, because they had no organs, no nothing. They were just odd clusters of ... cells. But to be honest, I would have preferred them just to be puppies! It’s even worse to think that tumours can grow to look like that!’
Tom agreed wholeheartedly.
‘You said the vet took these things to a congress?’
‘He said he would, and promised to keep me posted. Next thing I know, he never made it to the congress and the things had been destroyed.’
‘How?’
‘Well, the vet didn’t talk to me in person. When I rang he was always in a visit, and when I went there he was always out. I ambushed him one day’ laughed the man ‘cornered him in his own drive. He went pale and lied through his teeth.’
‘What did he say?’
‘That a clumsy assistant had left the freezer open on a Friday evening and everything in there went off. That the things had to be destroyed because they were rotten. Baloney! Then he had the nerve to say that he had decided against presenting them in the congress anyway. Upon reflection, he said, he had decided we had gotten overexcited about nothing. The nerve! By then I had already found out that the practice was very cosy with Ickfield Kennels.’
‘Cosy? How do you mean?’
‘That practice runs all the tests and checks for the kennels. They are breeders as well, you know, very successful. The practice gets very good publicity and a lot of regular money from Ickfield.’
‘You think the people at Ickfield had him destroy the things?’
‘I’d bet my house on it.’
‘But why?’
‘Look, it’s obvious that there is something fishy about that place. Your dog and mine, I can swear, they are only two out of many.’
‘What do you think they’re hiding?’
‘Oh, I’ll tell you what. The government must be conducting experiments there! With stem cells, perhaps. Genetics, whatever. Or maybe it’s some pharmaceutical company. It can’t be legal or else they wouldn’t need to do it in that place.’
‘But why use animals that have owners?’
‘I never said they intended what happened to our dogs to occur. I’m sure they were bad mistakes. God knows. But I tell you, there’s others out there.

The Kennels, Chapter 2

2.

At first Tom made excuses. The dog was acting weird because he had been at the kennels. Different place, different people, lots of unknown dogs. A couple of weeks later, the dog was still acting weird. It was subtle. He was quiet, still as a lizard. He moved more like a cat than like a seven-year-old labrador, and glared around without blinking. When he took him for a walk, instead of pulling and trying to sniff everything, the dog would walk calmly next to him and watch. When they bumped into another dog, he would be groaned at, but he would never retort. He just glared.

Tom was alarmed. He could not ignore it and he could not explain it. He couldn’t get rid of the disturbing feeling that this was not his dog.

One night, Tom was suddenly waken up by the sound of a high-pitched moan, one single sound. It was pain or anxiety and made Tom’s heart sink. He jumped off the bed and stumbled downstairs. He found Baloo sitting upright, stiff as a statue of Anubis, and looking at him with an expression that Tom could only describe as spiteful.

The morning after he took the dog to the veterinary. All he could really say was “he’s acting weird.” The vet did tests and took samples. He was even tempted to leave the dog there overnight. When he realised how eager he was to get rid of him, he made himself take Baloo home.

When the vet got back at him, she sounded funebre. Tom rushed to the practice, Baloo with him.

-Baloo has a tumour. –said the vet, with a motherly tone. –In his abdominal cavity. It’s very big. We could try and remove it, but a tumor this size... The most compassionate thing would be...

-To put him to sleep. –said Tom, too shocked to decide what he was feeling. –It’s the cancer the cause of him acting so strangely?

-Well, it could be. A tumour this big must surely be causing him pain. And perhaps the hormones...

Tom didn't believe her.

-I need some time. –he said after a moment.

-Sure. Take him home and, well, take your time.

-I’d rather he stayed. –said Tom all too quickly. And felt obliged to explain –In case he is in pain. You can look after him better, can’t you?

She invited Tom to bid his dog goodnight. Tom cleared his throat and approached the animal. Dog and human stared at each other with obvious mistrust. The vet thought it was very weird, but didn’t say a word.

Once he arrived home, Tom felt the emptyness of the house and struggled between sadness and relief. Mostly he felt guilty. He told himself that the tumor explained everything. He battered himself for his lack of compassion. He went back to the vet’s the next morning with the firm purpose to look after the dog until suffering became too much.

His resolution crumbled when he faced those brown reddish eyes, cold as ice, that seemed to tell “I know what you are planning”. He signed there and then to have the dog put to sleep, cremated and disposed of.

A few days later, still in shock everytime he came back from work to an empty house, a man came to him.

‘Your dog died of cancer, right?’ he said, out of the blue.

‘Who are you?’ was all Tom could reply.

‘My dog had cancer too, and he also caught it at Ickfield!’ said the man, as if that cleared everything.

Tom didn’t say “you don’t catch cancer”.

‘How do you know?’

‘We go to the same vet. Well, I used to go to a different one, but never again.’

‘What’s this all about?’

‘Look, this is what happened to me. When we went to Gran Canaria we left the dog to the kennels at Ickfield. When he came back he was all strange. A couple of months later there was blood in his poo, so we took him to the vets, the old one. They told me he had cancer. My missus wouldn’t have it put to sleep, so they operated. The dog died in surgery apparently. The vet said he’d never seen anything like it. He said he would like to take the case to a science congress or something. I asked to see what he was talking about. He showed me this’ he fumbled for his mobile phone. ‘You don’t have a week stomach do you?’ said, protecting the screen with the palm of his hand.

‘What are you talking about?’

The man showed him the mobile’s screen. At first Tom didn’t understand what he was looking at. Suddenly he realised, and gave a start.

‘Oh my god.’ He said, suddently feeling ill. ‘What is this?! Are these...?’

‘Yes’, said the man, triumphantly, satisfied with the reaction of his audience.

‘But, dear god... It has eyes!’

The Kennels, Chapter 1

1.

‘Here it is, Ickfield Road.”

Tom watched ahead for any car coming from the opposite direction and turned to the bumpy road leading to the kennels. It was a dreadful drive, with deep holes that seemed to be always pooled with water, and mounds that shook the car passengers around like sand in a rattle. There weren’t any lights, and the windows of the neighbouring farmhouses seemed to be lurking from their hiding places behind the trees like evil cat’s eyes. It hadnt’ rained for a while, but now a ragged white mist seemed to be setting down.

‘What a ghastly night.’ said Tom, as he struggled with the wheel to keep the car from smashing into the wooden fences flanking the road. Jack clutched his handle and didn’t say a word. He was always nervous around cars anyway, and a bad road like that made him feel like he should have gotten a better coverage on his life insurance policy. The drive turned amidst big empty fields sprinkled with construction materials and machinery. ‘I believe they’re looking to enlarge the business’ said Tom. They passed two huge gravel pyramids over six feet tall. ‘I think they’ve been meaning to fix the road for a while but haven’t gotten round to it yet.’ None of that helped Jack, who was very sorry already for having asked for a drive home from Tom after he had told him that he needed to pick up the dog from the kennels on the way from the airport.

The road ended abruptly past the gravel mounds, to a couple of blindingly bright stadium-like lights pointing to the road. If you managed to see past them, there was a long one-storey old house and a sizeable compound of open air spaces delimitated with metal grid and concrete columns. It looked like Guantánamo prision. Tom parked next to a huge, muddy 4x4 and turned off the car.

‘You wanna come?’ he said to Jack.

‘I’d rather wait.’ said Jack, without much thought.

Tom dismounted and walked to the long flat house, feeling his pockets for his checkbook and trying not to tread on the many mud pools in the way. Jack shuffled a bit in his seat, his back already pretty knackered from the flight and now all but done for from the drive. It was very cold and the tip of his nose felt like an egg right off the fridge. He hated that. The stadium lights went right into his eyes. He pulled the visor down but it only helped a little. He wanted to go home. He looked to the long flat house for Tom. It seemed to be taking him forever.

In the corner of his eye a glimpse of movement caught his attention. A little shadow had blocked the lights for a second, perhaps a bat. He noticed then there were long fenced corridors between each space. He couldn’t see any dogs inside the cells from where he was, but Tom had said they were always full. ‘Great facilities you see. Each dog gets a big space to run and a heated refuge. The other place where I used to take Baloo had only a couple of square meters and they promised to walk them twice a day, but you never know if they do, do you. This is a good place. But you need to book with weeks in advance, they’re very popular.’ Jack wasn’t really interested but had nodded out of politeness. Now he was bored, so he got off the car, buttoned up and took a couple of steps in no particular direction, his hands deep in his coat’s pockets, his nostrils smoking white steam. He approached the nearest cell. A hysterical stream of high-pitched barking greeted him. He didn’t like dogs or know much about them, but he could tell a Yorkie when he heard one. Annoying little buggers. The fenced space was as muddy and empty as the fields around. Scattered around where old shoes, leather bones, rubber balls and cloth rags. He didn’t know whether they belonged to the dog or to the kennels. He couldn’t have said for the life of him how long had they been there. Mud seemed to date everything there to the times of World War I.

The yorkie shutted up and peace was restablished. Jack cherished the silence. After a couple of minutes, though, he realised that it was strange. Didn’t Tom say it was always full? Didn’t dogs got excited by other dogs barking? Why was it so silent?

A metal clank clanked behind him. It was the door of the metal shed attached to the fence, which now he saw was like a protected passageway. A young man came out of it covered with a padded jacket, a cap and a blanket, rubbing his black paste framed glasses in his t-shirt. ‘Y’alright?’ he said, striding towards the long flat house and putting the glasses back on. Jack could have sworn without seeing them that they would be greasy and blurry. The bloke went in and he went out in about a second, back in the metal shed, clanking the door shut behind him. Tom came out of the house.

‘Alright?’ he said to Jack. ‘We’re almost done. They’ve gone to fetch him.’

Jack nodded, blowed steam.

‘The owners here’ said Tom in a murmur ‘they’re a middle aged couple, they always seem to be at each other’s throats.’

It started raining. Jack went back in the car.

Ages later, the bloke in a padded coat and cap came out of the metal shed with a bundle of blankets and a dog tied with a rope leash. It was a handsome black labrador, very nervous and very boisterous.

‘Oh, bugger.’ said Jack to himself in the car, with scenes of chaos and mayhem in his mind, in which a black labrador jumped on Tom in the middle of the motorway causing a dozen cars road accident with ten dead and fourty injured.

Tom put his own leash on the dog, who tried to stay put for the operation but was simply too excited to be able to sit still. Tom had never managed to train him properly, but it was a good dog and Tom liked being greeted with such a display of joy. Padded-coat and cap removed the rope leash.

‘’Kay then, see ya.’ He turned and went back into the metal shed.

Tom lead the dog pulling and jumping to the back of the car. The happy labrador tried to jump onto the boot before the door was fully open and banged his head. Jack cursed to himself again. Baloo the dog jumped in successfully the second time and sat down wagging his tale, pretty happy with himself. Tom shut the boot, got in the car.

‘Off we go then.’ said Tom, feeling cheerful. Even though it was so dark and his gesture would probably go amiss, Jack felt the need of smiling to Tom.

They wrestled the road back. Baloo in the boot didn’t make a sound. Jack was tempted to feel relief but reserved judgment. Animals are unpredictable.

They left the road between the farmhouses and entered a more civilised roadway. A few minutes later, already on the motorway, with the constant, almost soothing rubbing of smooth pavement under the wheels, it became starkly obvious that there was no conversation. When Tom spoke again, Jack could have sworn he was just looking for something to break the silence. He wasn’t.

‘How quiet he is, Baloo I mean. How strange.’

Jack nodded and mmmhed.

‘No, I mean it. Do you think he is ok?’

‘Leave him be, he must be tired.’ Jack said, begging that his driver would focus on the road and solely on the road.

‘Tired from what?’ replied Tom, rhetorically. ‘Baloo!’ he called. ‘Are you alright Baloo?’

Oh for Christ sake, cursed Jack inside his head. Do you expect him to reply?
‘Oh, there he is.’ said Tom eyeing the rearview mirror, with a relief people like Jack could never feel or understand.

Jack turned back his head –not even he could tell why- and was startled: there it was, Baloo’s head emerging from behind the back seats, looking at him. He wasn’t panting or moving at all for that matter, just staring right into his eyes.

‘Christ!’ mumbled Jack. ‘He scared me!’

Tom laughed.

‘He wouldn’t harm a fly.’

He eyed the rearview mirror again and Baloo’s eyes confronted him there. Tom realised he understood what Jack had meant, but didn’t mention it.