Eric McCormack - Cloud

She tapped the door three times and opened it.

We went into a very gloomy room. It had just one window in the southern wall with green stained glass in place of curtains, so not much daylight got through. The walls were lined with bookcases, and on a table in the middle of the room lay what looked like a brass telescope. There was a floor lamp and a sofa near a fireplace in which a low fire had been lit — no doubt to ward off the high moorland dampness. The only ornament on the walls was a dim photograph over the mantel. Pervading the air was a smell like incense.

At first, no one else seemed to be in the room.

Then Miriam spoke.

“Father,” she said. “I want you to meet my friend, Harry.”

My eyes were now becoming accustomed to the gloom. What had seemed at first like a pile of clothing on the sofa by the fireplace took on the shape of a flimsy-looking man in black pyjamas. He had thin grey hair, a thin face, and sad eyes. The thing I’d taken for a floor lamp beside the sofa was actually a metal pole on wheels with a bottle of some transparent liquid hanging from a hook. A tube from the bottle was connected to his left arm. I could also see now that he had a striped cat beside him.

I went forward to shake his hand. The cat arched its back and hissed at me.

Miriam’s father got slowly to his feet but didn’t shake my hand. In fact, he even drew his hand back from mine. I didn’t really mind. In the poor light, the fingers protruding from the pyjama sleeve looked shrivelled and dark, as though charred by fire — or, worse, they might have been the legs of a big spider.

From what Miriam had told me of his past, I’d associated her father with a life of action, exploring mighty oceans and exotic lands with his fleet of ships. Instead he looked more like a wreck being swept helplessly towards the reef.

“We won’t disturb your rest,” Miriam said to him. “I just wanted you to meet Harry.”

He nodded his head to me and shrank back into the sofa beside his cat.

“Let’s go,” Miriam said.

As we were leaving, I noticed that the photograph over the mantel was of Miriam Galt herself.

“I’M SORRY,” she said when we were outside the room again. “Sometimes he’s more sociable. Today, he wasn’t in the mood.”

Now that I’d seen her father and the state he was in, she was less reluctant to talk about him. Apparently, she herself would often sit with him for hours without his noticing her. Sometimes he’d spend all day on that sofa dozing, only nibbling at the meals brought to him. He even slept there most nights rather than go to his bedroom upstairs. On some of those nights, if the sky was cloudless, he’d disconnect himself from his pole and go into the garden. There, with his old ship’s telescope, he’d spend hours studying the heavens.

Miriam seemed to find this behaviour disturbing. But I thought it was, to an extent, understandable from someone who’d spent a lot of time at sea and might be familiar with celestial navigation.

“Yes, and it’s true I’ve learned a lot from him about the positions and motion of the stars,” Miriam said. “But now the main reason he watches them is that he believes a message might be written there — something especially for him. He often tells me so.”

That certainly made him sound a little mad, in addition to his physical illness, whatever that was. Out of politeness, I said maybe he’d recover and things would turn out all right in the end.

“There’s no chance of that,” she said.

Her reply made me think Miriam Galt wasn’t an optimist.

“I’ll show you some of his treasures, if you like,” she said.

We went up the staircase to a large room on the second floor. The ceiling light wasn’t very strong, so Miriam drew back the window curtain. The floor was of plain wooden planks and clear of all furniture except for a number of glass display boxes you might find in a museum. A bookcase stood against the far wall. There was also a stand with some sort of ship’s clock on it. Apparently its bell rang every half hour, day and night — I’d heard its high-pitched sound through the ceiling when we were with her father.

“Some of the collection’s worth a look,” Miriam said. “His officers used to pick things up for him on their voyages.”

Indeed, a number of the items were out of the ordinary. One box held two shrunken human heads, male and female, with long grey hair, their eyelids and lips stitched up. A longer box near the window held a collection of stilettos, machetes, and parangs with brown stains on the blades that didn’t look like rust. Another box was full of a variety of scrimshaws made of whalebone and narwhal tusks. They were skilfully incised with the usual kinds of romantic seafaring images, but also with scenes of hangings from yardarms and knifings in taverns.

In the bookcase against the back wall, most of the books were in poor condition, their covers warped, the print almost illegible. Some of them were just the kinds of things you’d expect to find on a ship: A Young Sailor’s Introduction to Seafaring , and Tides and Currents in the Straits of Malacca , and A Guide to Knot Making , and Travels in the Melanesian Islands . The others were an assortment of mildewed books such as you might find in any library on shore.

“All of them are from ships that foundered without survivors,” said Miriam Galt. “He doesn’t read them, he just likes to have them. For him the important thing is the idea that the last person to read them had drowned.”

What a grisly principle, I thought. This bookcase reminded me a little of the columbarium where my parents’ ashes were preserved. The neatly organized, outmoded books were the only memorials to their dead readers — and writers too, for that matter.

I said so to Miriam.

“In the end, that’s the fate of the contents of most bookcases,”

Miriam Galt said to me.

Six weeks of bliss had passed and now only a few days were left till school opened. Miriam knew I was becoming a little anxious.

“Come for dinner tonight,” she said one day. “It’ll be a special treat before school starts.”

Accordingly, around seven-thirty that night, I headed up over the moors and arrived at the manor just before eight o’clock. It was late summer but still daylight. For once, the only clouds in the Uplands sky consisted of millions of midges. Miriam welcomed me at the door and told me her father wouldn’t be joining us — he preferred to eat alone in the library.

I didn’t mind that at all.

“He told me to choose a gift for you — one of those books saved from a wreck,” she said. “I’m thinking of one in particular — I’ll give it to you before you leave.”

She’d cooked the meal herself: a roast beef that smelled and tasted delicious. We ate at the plain deal table in the kitchen then adjourned to the living room with a bottle of red wine. I was very aware of the presence of her father next door in the library, so I tried to talk quietly. Miriam assured me that the walls were thick and that our voices wouldn’t disturb him.

The curtains of the living-room window were open and it was dark outside now. We went over for a minute to look out. I could see that the night sky over the evergreens was clear and full of stars.

“They look so brilliant,” Miriam said. “But it takes so many eons for their light to reach us, the fact is they’re actually dead by the time we see them.”

People didn’t want to think about anything so sad when they were overwhelmed by beauty, I suggested.

“Truth’s truth,” she said. “Even on this earth, by the time we see anything it’s no longer the same as it was, and neither are we. Any scientist will tell you that’s so.”