Warren Fahy: Fragment

“The Devil Hisself!”

The captain looked at his first officer, who was not a man given to superstition.

Eaton nodded grimly. “Aye, Captain.”

The voice from the crack splintered as more unearthly voices joined it in a chorus of insanity.

“We should leave this place, Captain,” urged Mister Dunn. “’Tis clear no one was meant to find it-else, why would the Lord have put it here, so far away from everything?”

Captain Henders stared distractedly at his chaplain, then said, “Mister Graves, hoist the boat and make sail, due east!” Then he turned to all his officers. “Chart the island. But make no mention of water or what we have found here today. God forbid we give a soul any reason to seek this place.”

The hideous gibberish shrieking from the crack in the island continued.

“Aye, Captain!” his officers answered, ashen-faced.

As the men scrambled from the boat, the captain asked, “Mister Grafton, what has become of Mister Frears?”

“He’s been et by monsters, sor!”

Captain Henders paled under his freckles. “Master gunner, place a full broadside on that crevice, double shot, round and grape, if you please! As you’re ready, sir!”

The master gunner acknowledged him from the waist of the ship. “Aye, sir!”

Retribution fired a parting shot into the crevasse on lances of fire and smoke as she came about, blasting the cliffs like a castle’s ramparts.

Captain Ambrose Spencer Henders dipped a kite-feather quill into the porcelain inkwell on his desk and stared down at the blank page of his logbook. The oil lamp swung like a pendulum, moving the shadow of the quill across the paper as he paused, weighing what to write.

TheTridentcut thedeep water with her single-hulled bow and turned three wakes with her trimaran stern. She resembled a sleek spacecraft leaving three white rocket trails across a blue universe. The storm clouds that had driven her south for three weeks had vanished overnight. The sea reflected a spotless dome of scorching blue sky.

The 182-foot exploration vessel was approaching the center of 36 million square miles of empty ocean that stretched from the equator to Antarctica-a void that globes and maps usually took advantage of to stack the words “South Pacific Ocean.”

Chartered for the cable reality show SeaLife , the Trident comfortably quartered forty passengers. Now an “on-camera” crew of ten who pretended to run the ship, fourteen professionals who really ran the ship, six scientists, and eight production staffers, along with a handsome bull terrier named Copepod, rounded out her manifest.

SeaLife was chronicling the Trident’s yearlong around-the-world odyssey, which promised to encounter the most exotic and remote places on Earth. In its first four weekly episodes the cast of fresh young scientists and hip young crew had explored the Galapagos Islands and Easter Island, launching SeaLife to number two in the cable ratings. After the last three weeks at sea, however, enduring back-to-back storms, the show was foundering.

The ship’s botanist, Nell Duckworth, glared at her reflection in the port window of the Trident’s bridge, repositioning her Mets cap. Like all the other scientists chosen for the show, Nell was in her late twenties. She had just turned twenty-nine seven days ago, and had celebrated over the chemical-and-mint-scented bowl of a marine toilet. She had lost weight, since she hadn’t been able to keep food down for the last ten days. Her motion sickness had subsided only when the last of the massive storms had passed last night, leaving a cleansed blue sea and sky this morning. So far, bad weather, sunblock, and her trusty Mets cap had protected her fair complexion from any radical new pigmentation events. But she was not checking her reflection for wrinkles, weight loss, or freckles. Instead, all she noticed was the look of despair glaring back at her from the glass.

Nell wore taupe knee-length cargo jeans, a gray T-shirt, and plenty of SPF24 sunblock slathered on her bare arms and face. Her beat-up white Adidas sneakers annoyed the producers since Adidas was not one of the show’s sponsors, but she had stubbornly refused to trade them in.

She gazed south through the window, and the crushing disappointment she was trying not to think about descended over her again. Due to weather delays and low ratings, they were bypassing the island that lay just beyond that horizon-bypassing the only reason Nell had tried out for this show in the first place.

For the past few hours, she had been trying not to remind the men on the bridge of the fact that they were closer than all but a handful of people had ever come to the place she had studied and theorized about for over nine years.

Instead of heading one day south and landing, they were heading west to Pitcairn Island, where the descendants of the Bounty’s mutineers had apparently been planning a party for them.

Nell gritted her teeth and caught her reflection scowling back at her. She turned and looked out the stern window.

She saw the mini-sub resting under a crane on the ship’s center pontoon. Underwater viewing ports were built into the port and starboard pontoons-Nell’s favorite lunch spots, where she had seen occasional blue-water fish like tuna, marlin, and sunfish drafting the ship’s wake.

The Trident boasted a state-of-the-art television production studio and satellite communication station; its own desalinization plant, which produced three thousand gallons of freshwater daily; a working oceanographic lab with research-grade microscopes and a wide spectrum of laboratory instruments; even a movie theater. But it was much ado about nothing, she thought. The show’s scientific premise had been nothing but window dressing, as the cynic in her had chided her from the start.

On the poop deck below, she watched the ship’s marine biologist, Andy Beasley trying to teach the weather-beaten crew a lesson in sea life.

Andrew Beasley was a gangly, narrow-shouldered scientist with a mop of blond hair and thick-framed tortoise-shell glasses. His long, birdlike face often displayed an optimistic smile.

Raised by his beloved but alcoholic Aunt Althea in New Orleans, the gentle young scientist had grown up surrounded by aquariums, for he lived over his aunt’s seafood restaurant. Any specimens that came under his study were automatically spared the kettle.

He had gone on to live out Althea’s dream of becoming a marine biologist, e-mailing her every day from the moment he left home for college to the day he accepted his first research position.

Aunt Althea had passed away three months ago. After surviving Hurricane Katrina, she had succumbed to pancreatic cancer, leaving Andy more alone than he had thought possible after feeling so terribly alone all his life.

One month after her funeral, he had received a letter inviting him to audition for SeaLife. Without telling him, Althea had sent his curriculum vitae and a photo to the show’s producers after reading an article about the casting call for marine biologists. Andy had visited his aunt’s grave to put flowers on it, flown to New York, and auditioned. As if it were Aunt Althea’s last wish being granted, he had won one of the highly contested berths aboard the Trident.

Andy usually wore bright clashing colors that gave him a slightly clownish appearance. It also made him a natural target for sarcasm. He was as blindly optimistic and as easily crushed as a puppy-a combination that drew out a maternal impulse in Nell that was surprising to her.