Near the end of the wharf, I came upon a small freighter, manged with rust, older than the other vessels, but seaworthy nonetheless. A light on its deck shone uncomfortably into my eyes. I thought this light at first to be stationary, until it swung slowly away and I saw it held by a human hand.
“Who is it?” a voice asked.
I explained again my plight. I said I asked for no favors, only the privilege of working for my passage. I was, I said, willing to learn.
“Do you not care where we are bound?”
It was, I claimed, a matter of complete indifference to me. I wanted only to leave. I cited the unrest in the city, and wanderlust, saying nothing to hint at the fatal events that had taken place earlier.
“Shall we have your name then?” the sailor asked.
“My name?” I said, and, not caring to give myself away, said, “My name is Alfons Kuylers.”
“Ah,” the sailor said. “We’ve been expecting you, Kuylers. Come aboard.”
I should have gathered something from this odd reply and indeed might have, had I not been so rattled, and so pleased to have gained a berth. At the time, I simply forced the words from my mind — or rather pushed them below the surface, where they would remain in the murk, before slowly, like a corpse, rising again. Later, when I was unable to dismiss the sailor’s words so easily, I turned them over and over in my head. I had misheard, I told myself, my guilt substituting an impossibility for what had actually been said. When this ceased to satisfy, I began to think that perhaps Kuylers had meant to depart with me, that he had in fact forewarned the captain of the freighter of our joint arrival. This made me fear that I had killed my mentor for no reason.
But in the instant, such thoughts had been quickly pressed down unexamined and had long to wait before bloating and slowly surfacing again. For the moment, I simply placed one foot before the other, ascended the gangplank, and came aboard. When, on deck, I approached the lantern, looking for the sailor who had hailed me, I found that he had hung his lantern on the loop of a guideline and had disappeared. Thus when I moved toward what I thought to be him, I found no one at all.
Almost immediately, the vessel started to sway and move. I had seen no other figures on the deck, but perhaps they had been there all along, near their posts, veiled in darkness, only awaiting the arrival of one Alfons Kuylers. I caught myself on the rail and steadied myself, and then, as an afterthought, turned and looked back at the city. I was not sorry to see it go. I thought how, had I not been forewarned by Alfons Kuylers, the city might well have become my grave.
And it was in that moment, thinking of my mentor with a certain melancholy fondness but with something akin to hysteria and hatred bubbling just beneath, that I thought I saw, on the pier, motionless, a figure possessed of the same stooped posture as Kuylers. He stood there, unmoving. I watched him, and was unable to look away, until he faded into the darkness and, along with the pier he stood upon, was lost.
I felt my way forward until my fingers found the wall of the deckhouse, and then I followed the wall of the deckhouse to a small stooped entrance, which I passed through, and then found myself on a narrow set of stairs that I descended into darkness. I felt my way down a dark passage and came finally, after three locked doors, to a fourth door, which was cracked open slightly, a faint glow seeping through the crack. I pushed my way in, found myself in a narrow cabin, two berths on either side, one above the other. In between, a candle glimmered on a cask that had been turned on one end to serve as a makeshift table.
I had begun to crawl into a berth before realizing it contained another man, his skin, which I touched in my fumbling, oddly chill.
“Kuylers?” he asked.
I assented.
“Your berth is above,” he said. “But blow out the candle first.”
I apologized and, after blowing out the candle, clambered up and into the upper berth. The room was still a shade away from sheer darkness, lit now by the lesser dark of the night shining through the porthole. My eyes, already accustomed to the dim candle, quickly adjusted.
Even so, only once I’d been there for some time did I start to realize that the sailor below me was not the only other man in the room, that the other bunks were occupied as well. Why I had not seen this before in the light of the candle, I couldn’t say, but I saw the men now — first the faint gleam of their eyes, turned as I could tell toward me, and then, after more time, just a slight variance from the shadow of the berth itself, the hint of their large bodies.
“Hello,” I said.
There were vague rumblings in reply, the gleams of the eyes shifting or disappearing.
“My name is Kuylers,” I said. “Can you tell me yours?” I asked.
One of the men chuckled, but none offered their names.
“What is the name of this ship?” I persisted. “And what is our cargo?”
At this they all laughed. “Ah, Kuylers,” one of the men said, “go to sleep.”
Such responses being curious enough, I was reluctant to inquire further. I lay in the bunk wondering what I had got myself into, but exhaustion quickly caught up with me. Before I knew it, I was asleep.
I was awoken by sunlight streaming through the porthole. My companions, I saw, were already up and departed, bunks neatly made. I clambered down and arranged my own bunk as well, then made my way slowly out and onto the deck, the clean, cold salt air sharp in my lungs. I looked around for my cabinmates, but the deck itself seemed deserted, the deckhouse as well, and the ship itself stood still, as if becalmed. I made my way from stem to stern and back again, but found nobody there.
Once belowdecks, I found my own cabin just as I had left it, the three doors I had previously examined still locked. Following the passage back farther, I found it to lead past two other doors, also locked. An iron stairwell descended to the hold and to the engine room, both of which seemed deserted. I went on deck and found another stairway, at the bottom of which was another series of locked doors. The final door at the passage’s end, according to a bronze plaque, was the captain’s cabin. I opened this and found it deserted as well, bunk neatly made.
Not knowing what else to do, I knocked on each of the locked doors in turn, but had no reply. Uncertain of what to think of this, I spent the day wandering the vessel, examining it, doing what I could to occupy myself. In the captain’s cabin I found several books, including one on knots and their uses, and I spent the last part of my day trying to replicate the knots therein described, growing hungrier all the time.
I searched the ship for food, but could find nothing. Perhaps the galley was behind one of the locked doors where the crew, for reasons that were beyond me, had chosen to sequester themselves away from me.
It was like that throughout the day, the vessel motionless, becalmed, my hunger growing. In the captain’s cabin I found a hook and a coil of fishing line, but there was nothing with which to bait the hook. Still, I let the hook dangle over the side in hopes of catching something, coiling it in from time to time and regarding the empty, dripping curve of metal at its end before paying it out again.
Near evening, leaning over the side, a twist of fishing line around one wrist, I thought I saw something at a little distance. At first I took it for another vessel, but as it drew closer it seemed too small to be a boat. As it came closer still, it proved too animate to be anything not alive. I squinted against the fading light, becoming more and more convinced that the figure in the water was human.