Chapter 4 - “Samuel, Take Aim!”

At his Grandmother’s house, Arath was finally fast asleep after he and his uncle had lugged the cocoon down into the basement, where it was now hung alongside the various others, all at different stages of their decomposition. Arath had particularly strange dreams after encountering each of the ghosts that had begun haunting his daily life. These interactions with the paranormal were enough to set him off balance, no matter how comfortable he felt he had become in dealing with it all and even when shutting his eyes to reset his body, inside his mind still turned unexpectedly as if from an outside influence.

This particular nighttime slumber had placed Arath in the body of a sailor on a whaling ship over a hundred fifty years back into the past. He stroked a new beard while looking into the crashing waves that collapsed around the gliding ship, floating over the big, blue ocean with an endless horizon. There were men everywhere tending to varying duties such as manning the sails, preparing meals and loading harpoons into the ships on the side to be ready at a moment's notice. How long he had been a sailor in this lifetime was unknown but Arath accepted whichever fate he had been forced into in the nighttime hours.

During the dreams, he was lucid enough to explore and interact with other people, playing his part and finding out his current role in each situation. Dreams are often interpreted and studied with an intent to explain underlying motifs and themes but this was of no interest to Arath. It was like a derivative projection that resulted from emptying the contents of his mind. It might as well have been a soup made from emptying the fridge and pantry into a giant pot and setting the burner to boil.

A crew member of the ship shouted out to Arath to get back to work. “What are yer lollygagging about the place fer Samuel? Eyes on the sea. I feels her somewhere abouts these parts.” Arath, or in this timeline, Samuel, was scouting the seas for their prey. He looked down to his hands and saw that he was holding a spyglass that collapsed into itself in wooden layers with a metallic ring around each piece. He gazed into the ocean, looking for a sign of the grey beasts that lurked just beneath the surface, coming up occasionally to burst from their spout and bathe momentarily in the warm sunlight.

Some of the sailors had begun to sing a song as they had drifted into their robotic motions doing their repetitive tasks. One group was passing along wooden crates down a line to each other, throwing them down into a cellar below, contents not obvious to Arath. Another was unwinding a vast net and rerolling it around a cylinder that kept it tidy and without tangling. They hummed along to a song with lyrics that ached with loneliness that comes with the life of a sailor at sea:

The blisters on my tired hands

        Are swollen around a wedding band

        She waits at home while i’m with men

        Who’re sailing on the tides again

        Arath shouted down to the man who had reminded him of the work he was supposed to be tending to, curious about who he was in this life.

“Hey mister, have I ever told you about my wife?”

“Oh yer married are ya? Haven’t heard about the lady. What’s her name.” The sailor responded.

“Daffodil. She’s a seamstress.” Arath named her on the spot, giving her the first job he could think of for the time period. Maybe there was a real wife but the dream would hardly last long enough for him to return to shore and take a carriage to whatever place was home.

“Ah, that’s the flower of yer heart is it, Samuel? If only ye could see a bastard whale in that glass of yers already so I could get back to my sweet Adelia. Find a big’n won’t ye? I want her to have enough cabbage to make us both fat.”

“Sure thing bud.” Arath had a hard time keeping up with timeworn language that was spoken by the man, ending the conversation in the middle and looking back into the glass.

Out of habit, Arath reached his free hand into each of his pockets, inspected to see if the spiders of his reality had been realized in this alternate life as well but nothing but dust and lint were found among the worn denim insides. In this world, the pockets didn’t have spiders and maybe that was for the best.

In the far distance, puffs of foam and water misted into the sky as air was bursting through the surface in brief pulses. Arath gazed through his spyglass as intently as possible and saw the gray and shiny back of a whale now breaching the surface.

“Whale!” He shouted out to all that could hear his voice. Boxes were dropped, songs were hushed and feet began to pound on the wooden planks as they hurried to prepare the whaleboats on the side. Adelia’s husband shouted out to Arath, “Where is she, Samuel?!”

“Um, that way!” Arath was not familiar with the terminology to effectively communicate.

“How far?!”

“Like 50 meters I think?”

“Meters? Did you bake yer head in the sun too long, son?” The man complained to Arath but carried on regardless, passing freshly sharped harpoons to the small ships that the hunters would be riding in to duel with their prey. “Now get yer arse down here!”

Arath jumped down the crow’s nest that he was perched in, sliding down the wooden pole below him with speed. He landed on the ship's deck with a thundering thud, his body much taller and heavier than in his real life. The man gave him a big shove in the direction of one of the boats that had its share of men already seated.

“Hurry up! We don’t have time!” One of the men shouted at Arath as he arrived and sat in one of the back of the ship, grabbing an oar that was passed to him. The boat was lowered into the lively sea and the men quickly pierced the water with their oars and began to row in a synchronized team effort, Arath catching on as they moved towards the whale.

All four of the boats that had dropped into the sea in pursuit of the whale nearly came to their final destination, approximately where the whale was last seen. Arath looked back to the ship and calculated in his mind how far they had gone and imagined if this was the correct distance but he was quickly proven correct as the whale again moved through the surface of the sea, causing all of the boats to shake and drift in different directions.

“Harpooners ready!” A man shouted as each boat had a man dressed down to his bare essentials with the gloriously sharp harpoons in hand, now held in an attack position to bring their whale to its demise. “Now!”

Each of the harpooners had taken aim and heaved their giant metal arrows into the direction of the whale. Two of the harpoons had missed entirely; another had just grazed the whale, leaving a long red and bleeding line; the last harpoon had punctured the blubber of the whale enough that it stayed in place as blood sprayed in spread mist into the air. “Hit! More! More!”

The whale groaned a mighty groan as it whipped its body around in the direction of its assailants, diving down into the water and causing a large disturbance in the waters that tipped one of the boats over completely. Arath’s boat nearly turned all the way in a full circle before stabilizing. The whale would have to come back to the surface for air sooner than later so the whalers had only but a brief moment to readjust themselves. Arath was scanning the sea for the reemergence of the beast before he heard it rising through the waters directly behind the boat he was in. The whale soared half of its body length into the air before crashing down directly onto Arath’s ship, shattering the boat completely and sending the men down into the depths.

He opened his eyes to try to see through the burning saltwater in his eyes; next to him was one of the men, totally smashed to pieces that would quickly float separately back to the surface of the ocean. Arath had miraculously survived the slamming of the whale but he was now sinking down into the waters. His body should have floated back to the surface but he felt a mighty force pulling on his leg. When he looked down, he saw the harpoon that had landed in the whale had now caught onto his pants, dragging him down with tremendous speed alongside the whale. At this rate, the pressure of the sea would crush him or he would run out of air but the whale kept diving deeper. Arath looked above to the surface as the light shone through the layers of the ocean less and less.

He felt himself falling out of consciousness before the whale finally turned itself back into an upwards path to the surface. Arath’s eyes were failing him, falling more and more to a close as the whale soared upwards. When the whale finally ascended beyond the blue veal, Arath, as Samuel, had shut his eyes and faded out of that particular existence, immediately seeing once again that he had returned to the world he was meant for.

He was once again lying in his bed with warm covers spread over his body and his head resting flat on a pillow. A lifetime ending just as quickly as he came to know it. It wouldn’t be so easy to shake off such a wild ride but maybe he could at least let it slip away from his memory as dreams quickly do when waking up. A walk to the bathroom was often just enough to ground a dreaming person back into reality enough so that they could return to sleep and potentially begin a new adventure.

He opened the bathroom door and began to pee, his eyes half open with the lights not even turned on. He stared forward half asleep and heard the bubbling of the toilet water as he relieved himself but overcoming the sound was a thud from the floor below. He stopped midstream to focus and again heard a thud coming from just below. He finished his business and walked down the hallway and to the top of the stairs. In addition to the thud was now a ripping and tearing sound. It was as if t-shirts were being torn apart by bare hands. Arath walked down the stairs and could hear the noise more specifically coming from beyond the door of the basement. He put his ear onto the door and there was silence for a moment, then loud thudding footsteps and silence once again.

Arath pulled his hand from his pockets and spiders began to crawl onto his arm and he opened the door. The basement was pitch black until Arath flipped on the light switch to see who the intruder was. All along the floor were tatters of the webbed cocoons, their casings ripped and torn to shreds that littered all across the concrete. Each one torn apart and emptied until nothing remained. Arath walked down and looked for any remaining signs of the inhabitants but saw no ghostly remains.

Finally, he looked to where the newest addition was and there, kneeling down in front of the emptied silk casket was Druvy, a knife in his hand with tiny fragments of webs falling off the edge of the blade.