The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories by Les Galloway Page B

the engine out of gear and stumbled out onto the heaped upsharks on deck. The spot where May had gone down was lost in an instant. There was nothing anywhere, nothing at all but the silent inbound passage of the waves. A cool, steady wind was blowing now. There was no smell to it, only the feeling that it had come from a long way off, an unspeakable distance, from nowhere and going nowhere.
    Suddenly I began to shake, my legs inside my bloody dungarees, my skinny, aching arms, my head, my shoulders. I shook inside. Then my insides seemed to turn to water. My knees went limp and I slipped down quivering upon the deep layer of sharks. For a moment I felt nothing. Then slowly I could feel the abrasive hides, the hard dead flesh beneath and then the viscous slime that enveloped everything and was oozing through my clothes and over my skin. I got up and staggered back into the wheelhouse, holding my hands far in front of me. A clean damp rag lay folded neatly beside the compass box. It was May’s rag. I picked it up and began to clean myself. Soon the rag was thick with slime. I wadded it into a ball and flung it over the side, then went back to the wheel. A strange quiescence came over me; all feeling seemed numb or dead. Yet I could think quite clearly. I studied the sky. A few ragged clouds, forerunners of the great dark bank now high above the horizon, sped eastward. Probably it was one of these that had caused the momentary darkness a while before. The wind was blowing harder now, and the swells, with their mountainous crests and deep, black valleys, were traversed by row upon row of fast moving waves. I pulled the wheel over and, with the
Blue Fin
rolling heavily under her huge load of sharks, headed back toward Half Moon Bay. At that moment, another cloud crossed the sun and blotted out everything. Then, just for an instant, a picture flashed into my mind of the long and empty darkness ahead.

Where No Flowers Bloom

The sky was clear and I could see the mast moving slowly like a tall shadow under the stars. The pale yellow flame of the riding light, swinging a little on the halyards, gleamed darkly on the orange-varnished mast high above the top spreaders. In the last of the dying breeze I could still smell the sweet fragrance of wild hay and clover from the Channel Islands now far astern. The long, deep-breasted swells that had rolled down from the northwest all day had flattened out till they were no more than a gentle lifting and falling like the slow breathing of a deep, dreamless sleep. Ragged trails of blue starlight slashed across the low black slopes and over the horizon a vague luminescence glowed with a soft light like the afterglow of moonset.
    Along toward midnight the fog came up out of the west, high, dark-shadowed, advancing steadily across the sky, bearing in its misty wreaths the cold, salt smell of the sea. In a little while the stars were gone and there was only blackness where the ocean’s rim was meant to be.
    With the coming of the fog a subtle change came over the sea, an ominous coming to life. I went forward and made certain all was secure, then returned to the cockpit. Down in the water I could see the strange oblate forms of jellyfish swimming. Convulsive movements, darklighted by the phosphorescence. Now and then a school of anchovies flashed by and after them the flame-bound form of some big fast-swimming fish streaked like a rocket streaming fire through the full blackness of oblivion.
    All night the boat drifted. The fog closed off the seafrom the sky and heavy darkness clung to the water. Yet below the quiet surface, the phosphorescent, starlight-gleaming noctiluca spangled all the downward universe, and constant fire trails marked the silent, deadly passage of the fish.
    And all the night I waited, keeping watch for the wind. In the dark hours the waves lapped softly under the transom, and deep in the hull the rudder post thumped from side to side with the dull sound of wood on wood.