Chapter 16
THE SHIPWRECK
I don’t remember going to bed that night.
I certainly wasn’t tired. Whatever spell Aster performed on me when he put his hands on my eyes worked, and the effects went beyond the simple task of staying alert.
My blood felt different in my veins, fiery and vibrant like he had gifted me a second heart.
My eyes focused sharper than ever. My vision cleared, and instead of hearing a chorus of crickets outside I heard thousands of voices.
They didn’t sound like insect voices, either, but human and passionate.
Even angelic, calling to each other and to us, for us to notice them. I turned my head.
Keep writing, urged Aster.
I began typing at once, but I bit my tongue to keep myself from asking him more about what he did. He would tell me later, I reasoned. The next time he took me to bed, everything would become clear.
Eventually a haze intercepted my thoughts, a cloudiness that pulled me from the here and now.
It didn’t feel like sleepiness as much as paralysis or hypnosis.
I knew nothing but the musical drone of Aster’s voice as he spoke, and the room around us darkened despite the lights.
My fingers continued tapping on the keys, but now they didn’t press down.
They didn’t need to. Was I even typing at all, or did the words appear on their own because of the connection between me and Aster?
Aster paced around me for a good part of the night.
Then he grew still, his voice maintaining an instructional staccato while he waited behind me, and gradually he lowered his head.
When it reached the point where I could feel his breath tickling my ears, my skin prickled.
His voice was close enough to me to energize me all night long.
Aster paused in his dictation for the first time at an hour I guessed to be close to dawn. At first I kept typing. The rhythm of the book had grown so automatic that I know the next patch of text without needing to hear it first.
Then he patted me on the back. It’s not bad, for a rough draft, but it needs more life in it. Don’t you think?
Then a splash of cold water dripped onto my arm from above. My first thoughts involved a leaking pipe or appliance. This house went back over a hundred and fifty years—long enough for minor damage to creep in and make its mark—and I had no idea how often anyone came to maintain the property.
I glanced at the ceiling instinctively. At first I didn’t notice the change in the room. I saw only that the clean white paint overhead had morphed into an endless murky black, an impossible and all-encompassing shade reminiscent of the blackness of space.
Is this better? asked Aster, extending before him a brass gas lantern, an antique that emitted our only light in a dull glow.
We had moved. I had missed the transformation entirely because of my entranced focus, but now I saw that Aster had successfully swept me away to a venue that had been abandoned generations ago, somewhere utterly dark with dense, alien overgrowth cutting through the windows and the contents of a large desk spilled over the front.
I hugged myself and stood up while I adjusted to the new setting.
We were in a dark, shadowy Victorian room, in the cabin of what appeared to be an antique ship.
Aster and I stood on a wooden floor, an old flooring badly scuffed and half rotted away.
The curves around the furniture and windows matched late nineteenth-century architectural standards, elegantly carved with a suggestion of French curlicues. “Where are we?” I asked.
When I opened my mouth, I sensed that the air had changed too. It was impossibly thick and cold. Not like air at all.
I could give you a precise location, but I doubt you would find any value in it.
I repeated my question.
Aster waited and glanced upward. The floor of the Atlantic.
I started to continue my query, to tell him I didn’t know what he meant by that, but then a school of pale fish floated in through the open window.
This wreck is the reason our lighthouse was built, said Aster.
“The floor of the Atlantic,” I echoed. My eyes darted around the shadows, the structure of the room and state of the wooden planks that built it. “You took us to a wreck.”
Aster nodded. We’re on the St. Marie.
“The St. Marie?” I asked, recognizing the name from the book we were writing.
“You mean it’s real? You mean the trip actually happened, and we’re…
here?” My voice rose with giddiness. I wanted to scrounge around every inch of this place.
I wanted to know how we’d come here and what other delights Aster had in store for me.
My muse’s eyes sparkled with pride. This is the captain’s desk, he said as he paced to the structure. This is the window he looked out of when he first saw the storm and realized the ship was about to go down.
“And here’s James McGregor himself,” I heard myself saying in a grim voice when I found the skeleton reminiscent of our protagonist lying on the floor behind the desk, still dressed in full regalia.
I had only seen dead bodies on a few distinct occasions in my past, always elderly relatives carefully embalmed and buried in their Sunday best.
This man didn’t even look human. His bones caught in the dull glow of the lantern light. At one time, his uniform, blue and still buttoned, would have been worthy of such a burial. Now the sea had worn it into a frayed mess.
James McGregor was the protagonist of Aster’s novel—of our novel. I’d never thought of him as a real person but just as a character. Seeing him buried in a tomb no one could visit made me hug myself in macabre fascination.
Aster walked around me and kneeled before the pathetic figure, twisting the skull to the side so that the eye sockets fixed on us.
My throat tightened. I looked at the dark hair over the scalp, hair that once framed a human face. “Is it really him?” I asked. “Is he real? Is this?”
The man himself? Yes. But the character you and I have crafted could be reflected in any face.
Think of it. This man’s been lying here generation after generation.
He never told his dog goodbye, and his daughter is still looking out that window counting clouds.
He never even got to eat breakfast the next morning.
We get a storm on land and we close the windows.
The same storm out here—no, up there, he corrected, pointing up, could end your life.
I stood tall and looked upward. Underwater like this I couldn’t judge the brightness of Aster’s lantern. I supposed that his supernatural energy cast the illusion of a light that overpowered the depths of the sea, or possibly the reality.
From here, a massive pocket of black betrayed where the proud arched ceiling had rotted away entirely. Past that, Aster’s light could not shine. “Why did you take me here?” I asked. “Could you always do this? Go wherever you want and... take me with you?”
I can do whatever you need to get a grasp on your work, he said.
His eyes sparkled. Then the music began.
At first I thought I imagined the sound, and I ignored it as I reached out and traced the contours of the captain’s desk. A delicately painted white and blue China teacup lay split in half over the top. This whole place could be in a museum.
The substance around us mirrored both air and water. My skin felt dry, but my hair floated around my head whenever I moved. The atmosphere had felt thick but also quiet, completely still, until now.
The tune I noticed earlier started with a whistle, and then a faint chime, like a wind chime in the distance. It sounded grainy and partly decayed, like a recording from an old gramophone.
The sound came in so subtly that I had to cover one ear with a hand to tell for certain that I heard it at all.
My eyes scanned the perimeters of the dark around us for a source of the notes: maybe some kitchen utensils had fallen from their resting place, or an old door hinge had remembered to creak.
Meanwhile Aster surveyed me with a familiar coolness. Do you mind? he asked, and only then I saw that he extended a hand to me.
I stepped away from the corpse, and my cheeks flushed.
The music grew louder and the notes more defined against the dark, warped and eerie.
You understand, a simple trip to the beach would not have helped like this, said Aster. He turned his head to meet my eyes.
“No indeed.”
We needed something much closer to the source. And now we have it. And to make the moment complete, I should like to dance with you in the manner of the era, said Aster.
I pressed a hand to my face. Now I knew the reason behind the blushing. “I can’t dance,” I said. “I don’t know how.”
It was true. I’d never been connected much to my physical body, and dance was a foreign concept. My presence had never inspired a room. In fact, the only audience I could count on to welcome me was the blank page.
Allow me to teach you, said Aster.
I stepped closer to him, and I closed my eyes. I was still giddy from Aster’s earlier enchantment, how he eliminated from me my need for sleep. Where did his power end? What more could he do with me if he wanted?
Aster kept things simple at first. He took both of my hands in his, and then we swayed in place. The music swelled. I surrendered to its easy cadence while Aster drew me in closer to his chest.
I held against him as if in a tight hug. I could feel him breathing against me, hear his heart thumping resolutely in his chest, inhale the sweet scent of his natural musk.
It’s just another way of making love, you see, said Aster. A way for the two of us to push against the boundaries that fence us in.
My shoulders dipped as he changed his hold to an embrace. “I thought we had writing to do,” I said, delighted. “I thought you wanted to work straight through the night. Whatever happened to that?”