David Golemon - Leviathan

He clutched the large set of keys with both hands and brought them to his chest. As his eyes looked about he saw the other cells neighboring his own. He wondered if each was filled with the cruelness and brutality he had endured the past three years. Was there a man behind each door who had been subjected to the same horrific treatment that he had endured? His mind refused to answer as he rolled onto his knees. The pool of blood from the captain had spread thickly on the blocks of stone that made up the floor of the corridor. He stumbled as he tried to rise, using the wall for leverage. He became light-headed, and then he felt his stomach lurch and he spewed bile as a geyser would let loose water. Still, he stumbled and fell, stood and slid down the wall until he found steps leading upward.

Deveroux made his way slowly up the stone steps, constantly aware that his dealings with the guards would soon be discovered from another, unknown direction he wasn't aware of. He kept climbing, still holding the keys to his chest as if they were his wife's crucifix.

He stopped when he heard sound. A door, iron by the sound, had opened. As he tried to see in the darkness forward of his position, he made out a dim hallway that curved off to the right on the next level. He heard the sound of men from what he believed were two levels above him. Not fearing death, Deveroux moved to the next level. Then he smelled it. The only thing that had kept him alive the past two years had been that smell. It was the sea. He could now hear the crashing of the breakers far better than he had ever heard them before. He moved forward once the landing of the next level was reached. Then he heard shouts as he had been spied from above.

"Stop!"

Deveroux heard the command and the running of more than one guard as he stumbled toward the sound and smell. He fell, cried, and found his legs would not work. Finally he spied the door through his flowing tears. This one was wooden, not iron. With the footfalls sounding louder, now on his level of the fortress, he stood and pulled down on the latch. As he did, the door swung open and he was blinded by bright sunlight from the setting orb that seemed to blaze just beyond the open window.

Several women gasped and one screamed as he fell blindly through the doorway and into the kitchen. The smells of cooking meat, fish, and garlic now rode roughshod over the smell of the sea. He erratically made his way toward the fresh air streaming through the open window. More screams, and then the sound of the door opening and men running inside.

With a burst of strength he didn't know he could muster, Deveroux ran for the open window. Through his hurting and failing eyes he saw the sea far below. The men would not stop him from sending himself down into that sea and its waiting embrace of death. As a hand grabbed a piece of his rotted shirt, Deveroux leaped.

The guard ran to the wide window as a woman screamed. He saw the thin man plunge a hundred and fifty feet to the rocks and the crashing sea far below.

Napoleon's prisoner was content to let the blue ocean take his body. The smashing caress of the water stunned him when he hit from such a dizzying height. He opened his eyes against the sting of salt and saw that breakers were pushing him toward the jagged rocks that made up the bulk of the island that Chateau d'If sat upon. To drown, or to be smashed upon the rocks? The equation didn't concern him; what did was the horrible thought of being pulled from his death by guards who were surely on their way down to recover his body.

With this thought in mind, Deveroux knew what he had to do. He opened his mouth to take in as much of the salt-laden sea as he could, so as to cheat Napoleon of his destiny. As his suicidal moment came, he felt a sharp nudge on the left side of his body and felt the skin of an animal, a shark possibly, push against him. Then another, and then still another. As he opened his eyes he saw he was in the middle of a family of dolphins that were playing with him, pushing him first one way and then the other. Suddenly he found himself being pushed toward the one place he didn't want to be, the surface. He kicked and kicked, trying to get the playful animals to let him die in peace, but they still nudged him toward daylight with their hard noses.

"Damn you," he whispered as water flooded his mouth. His imagination and hallucinations then brought his end into perspective — he felt small, soft, almost gelatinlike hands grab at his tattered clothing, keeping him afloat as the dolphins chattered around him.

Deveroux gasped for air as a breaker smashed over his head. He was then pushed back to the surface by the strange, dreamlike hands of angels, with fine hair and silken soft bodies. Were these mermaids of the old tales he had listened to as a boy?

When he managed to open his eyes he saw that he had been pushed almost a mile from the point where he had struck the sea around Chateau d'If. As he weakly treaded water he saw men at the base of the fortress searching the area where he had struck the sea. He laughed for the first time in two years, a hoarse, very desperate-sounding thing. The dolphins joined in with their strange chatter and swam about him as if they were a part of the warped and twisted joke. Of the soft-handed, strangely glowing mermaids, or angels, he saw none.

The tide was taking him farther from land; he could no longer see the coastline. Even the dreaded and cursed fortress was now but a small speck on the horizon.

Floating contentedly, awaiting his new fate, he felt a sharp pain as something hit him from the side once more. As he rolled his thin body over, expecting his playful saviors, he came face-to-face with a large tree trunk, detritus of the ocean. Several of the dolphins had pushed the tree toward him. He decided he would wait for the friendly creatures to leave and then he would allow the sea to do its best. For reasons he did not fathom, the smartest animals in the ocean wanted him to live.

As he floated for hours on end, Deveroux thought about why God was sparing him. He had sent his marvelous creatures, and what Deveroux thought of as angels, to delay the death of this poor man of science for a purpose. The thoughts and memories of his family swirled in his mind as darkness came. He was being swept farther out to sea as the moon rose and set, and then dawn was upon him once more.

The sound of breakers and the coldness of the waters awoke the delirious Deveroux from a nightmare-filled sleep. He had been dreaming not of the murders of his wife or father, but of the evil men who had taken them from him. The dream seethed with hate and a desire for vengeance upon these men and their master. The force of the nightmares had kept his heart beating throughout that cold night and into the hazy morning following. Two days and two nights he floated on the gentle currents of escape.

Now, the sound of normalcy returned to replace the cries of his unjust treatment. The cawing of seabirds strangely mimicked the cries of his dream wife and father as they swooped low to investigate the floating tree trunk. The chatter of his constant companions, the dolphins, made him turn toward their sound. There, a hundred meters away, was a small island. Scanty trees broke up the outline of its rock-strewn shore and made him think for a terrifying moment that he was floating right back into the arms of Chateau d'If.

A large breaker caught his floating tree and pushed him toward what he now knew would be his final moment; the jagged rocks lining the shore came at him at a breakneck pace. However, something strange was afoot; the dolphins were taking the wave with him, jumping and chattering as they rode the wave in. As the waters crested he lost his grip on the tree and found himself being sucked through the rocks and into a cave opening revealed at the low tide of the morning hours. He hadn't seen it from his position behind the breakwater, but as soon as he was swept inside, it was cold and dank, almost as lightless as his onetime prison cell. The dolphins pushed him to a small sandy beach, chattered, then swam away, as if content they had accomplished what they set out to do. Deveroux rolled over, feeling the blessed earth beneath his tattered clothing. He collapsed and allowed a dreamless sleep to overtake him.