But the thing didn’t approach him. It turned away and shambled back out across the deck into the darkness from which it had emerged, and after a few minutes he heard a long, rattling whisper of sifting gravel, and he knew that the thing had relaxed its sketchily anthropoid form back into the tiny stones that had comprised it.
It took Crawford a long time to get back to sleep.
CHAPTER 6
Ye that see in darkness,
Say, what have ye found?
—Clark Ashton Smith, Nyctalops
Something bumped against the hull, and Crawford awakened instantly, thinking that the gravel creature was up and moving around again—but the whole ship was creaking and rocking, and he could hear voices and the clumping of boots from overhead, and he guessed that they were arriving at their destination. After a few minutes his guess was confirmed by the splash of the anchor hitting the water. It was still night, unless somebody had fastened covers over the portholes.
He stood up quietly and groped his way to the porthole he’d come in through, being careful not to blunder out across the deck, and even when he was still yards short of the porthole the incoming land-scented breeze let him know that there was no cover in place, and that dawn had not yet come.
He poked his head out, and by starlight he could see a long stretch of land across a wide expanse of calm water, and he knew the ship was in some harbor. The air was hardly chilly at all now, leading him to believe that the ship must have sailed south—so this was France, or just possibly if they had made very good speed and exhaustion had made him sleep much longer than he thought, Spain.
He took off his boots and tied them together with his belt so that he could carry them while swimming, then set them down and peered out to fore and aft, trying to decide when he’d best be able to jump into the water unobserved … but when gravel shifted somewhere on the deck behind him he just sprang through the porthole in a somersault, touching the rim with nothing but his fingertips.
He hit water feetfirst, and plunged far down into the shockingly cold depths.
And he woke up completely; the seawater cleared his head of the feverish confusion that had plagued him throughout the last week, and as he began frog-kicking back up toward the water’s invisible surface he was already making plans.
He would return to England somehow and vindicate himself—after all, he was a respected doctor, and no jury could judge him even physically capable of doing what had been done to Julia—and he would shake this weird obsession with Switzerland. Keats’s tales were self-evidently the fantasies of an imaginative would-be poet. Crawford didn’t understand how he could even have listened to such nonsense.
Then he broke the surface and gulped air, and the doubts fell in on him again. He began paddling toward the stern of the ship, for the sound of voices seemed to be louder up by the bow, and he had already dismissed his momentary hope of returning to England and vindicating himself. You’ve already crossed the channel, he told himself; the Alps—the majestic, towering, dream-known Alps—are ahead of you. You can’t possibly turn back now.
Hell, he thought, even if you could go back safely …
When he rounded the high, square stern he saw that the ship’s anchorage was a good distance out from shore. The sky had only begun to glow a deep predawn purple over some hills far away across the black water on his right, but he was able to see a shoreline ahead of him, and patches of trees that seemed to shine faintly on the rising land beyond.
He looked back up at the ship, and was blinded by the relatively glaring light that shone from the cabin windows; he glanced away for several seconds as he quietly treaded water, and then squinted back, avoiding looking directly at the lights. There was one man visible on deck, his face and hands strangely luminous against the dark sky, but he was looking at the mainland, not down at Crawford, who turned away and began paddling silently toward shore.
After ten minutes of swimming he stopped berating himself for having jumped without grabbing his boots, for he knew now that he’d never have been able to drag them along with him all this way … but he was sorry that he’d used his belt to tie them together.
It made him nervous to be swimming in deep water without anything to lean on if he should get tired—he was reminded of dreams in which he could fly, but was always hundreds of feet in the air when his arms began to cramp from the furious flapping necessary to keep him aloft. Could he still get back to the ship? He turned and looked back, but the ship was now as distant behind him as the shore was ahead. Fighting down panic, he resumed his course. He had never felt as alone and unprotected … and when his knees and feet eventually bumped against sand, and he realized that he had reached shallow water, he wanted to nuzzle the gritty stuff like a strayed sheep finally found by the sleepless shepherd.
The sky was gray in the east now, and the trees on the distant hills had lost their luminosity. When he stood up and began wading to shore he saw low buildings—houses and a church tower—a few hundred yards ahead, and he paused, wondering what to do now. The surf swirled around his bare ankles, feeling warmer than the air now.
His French was no better than utilitarian—assuming this was France, which he hoped, for he knew no Spanish—and this didn’t look like a gathering spot for cosmopolitans. France and England had been at war too recently for the general populace to be eager to help a lost Britisher. The only marketable skill he had was doctoring, and he couldn’t imagine a crowd of peasants being eager to let him set their broken bones … much less let him attend to their pregnant wives.
Would the shopkeepers accept British money? Wet British money? If not, how was he even to get beer and bread and dry clothes?
The bell in the church tower began ringing, rolling its harsh notes away across the echoless gray salt flats, and he wished he were Catholic so that he could ask for sanctuary; or a Mason or a Rosicrucian or something, able to turn to his secret brethren for help.
As he walked up the sand slope it occurred to him that he was a member of a secret brotherhood … though he didn’t know if they were at all concerned with helping one another.
Let’s see, he thought, do I know any passwords? Neffy? God knows what that might mean in French. Should I wave a bloody handkerchief? Stick a pebble in my cheek like a squirrel and wink at people?
Then he remembered what Keats had said about the unmistakable “look” a neffer had—he’d said that Crawford must newly have become one, or he’d be used to getting attention from strangers who could recognize that look.
So he just walked around the little town, shivering in the onshore breeze and smiling at the fishermen who trudged past him down the broad lanes toward the beached dories, and then at the people who began ambling up to open the shops. Many of them looked twice at the haggard, soaked figure, but none of their gazes seemed to hold the kind of interest he was looking for.
Eventually he found a warm chimney and leaned against it, and it was there that the very old man in the dun-colored cassock found him. Crawford noticed him when he was still a dozen yards up the street—and the old man was hunching along so slowly, seeming to put the whole weight of his frail body on his gnarled walking stick with each step, that Crawford had plenty of time to study him.
Strong-looking yellow teeth were exposed when the leathery cheeks pulled back in a grin, and from deep in wrinkle-bordered sockets glittered an alert and humorous gaze; but Crawford wanted to look away, for it was somehow clear to him that longevity had been more costly to this man than it was to most. The figure stopped in front of him.