Chapter 2 #2
“It’s only you, the doctor, and the lieutenant. It’s obviously uninhabitable. We turn back and you—”
“What?” I glared at him, unable to believe I’d recently thought him the only sensible man on the ship.
“Tell them it’s uninhabitable. Look at it, Clara!
Are ya daft?” he snapped, his normally soft Irish accent bleeding into his words.
“This place is evil. It’s in the water and the air and everything.
I know you feel the fear. It’s pushing out from beneath its soil and onto us; you’re not immune, no matter how brave you are. ”
I whirled away and moved, but he followed right behind.
“It’s cursed land,” he continued. “There is a reason a population has not taken it up. Look at it. Mark my words, woman, no good will come from that land, and we’d be the wiser for getting away from it as fast as possible.”
“You’re as bad as they are. I thought I was the only bad omen this ship needed to worry about?”
“Clara—”
“Mick,” I snapped. “It’s land. It’s not cursed, nor is it evil.
You sailors put too much weight on feelings.
What good has feeling anything ever done?
” I held up my hand to cut off his protests.
“We anchored at twilight on a night that was abnormally still and silent. You, like everyone else, forgot it was empty land. You were expecting sounds of the populace you’ve grown accustomed to greeting you at ports and busy places you arrive at; this is just different from what you were unconsciously expecting, and therefore your mind infers that it’s empty and evil.
Everyone has been restless and eager to head back ever since the fever, that’s it.
Wild imaginations don’t help with anything, believe me, and I’m certainly not going to give up the biggest and, frankly, only meaningful opportunity of my entire life because it was quiet… and a little unsettling.”
He tilted his chin down and glared at me from under thick brows. He looked for a split second as though he might beg me not to go.
“Here we go, boys,” shouted Captain Sheamus from behind us.
They had returned.
There was a significant struggle to get the injured man up the ladder. It took four men to hoist him enough that the men assisting him could get his body onto the deck.
A slow wave of murmurs flowed across the crew. I struggled desperately to see the cause of the murmurs, but the darkness of the night and the many men shut me out of view.
“What are you doing?” The captain’s uniformed chest cut off any further attempt at viewing the man.
“I’m on my way to the sick bay now, sir,” I said with a respectful dip of my chin. Even though I wanted to fight and scream that any of the men would be better suited to play nursemaid to the man, I knew it would be useless.
“The sick bay reeks of the fever still; he will go to your quarters. You’ll be gone at first light, anyway.”
I sucked icy air against my teeth. “You can’t be serious? You’re suggesting that a strange man should stay in my room? I will be back aboard the ship at dusk; we are too small a company to sleep unprotected on the land. You know this; we’ve discussed it many—”
“Now your propriety is at risk? You’ve given me many a speech to be treated just as the men are.” His eyes hardened on me.
Loud gasps from the crowd behind him stole both our attention momentarily, though he was the only one tall enough to see anything. My low curse dissipated in the freezing night air. His head snapped back from looking over his shoulder, his brows pinched together oddly.
“I’m not being treated just as the men are by you forcing me to be a nursemaid—” I protested.
“You either share a room with one injured man, or you share a room with thirty uninjured, Miss Bulkley. The choice is yours to make. Upon my first inspection of the man, I presumed he would either die tonight or become well enough to join the crew for the journey home. Once he’s cleared by the doctor, he may join the others in the hammocks—that should motivate you to tend to him appropriately.
” He glared knowingly before turning away but doled out a few last-minute orders of the supplies I was to grab before joining them in my room.
Despite my bones aching and my skin burning from the cold, I somehow could not bring my legs to move.
Several men had brought the injured man to stand, supporting him under his arms, and he was moving.
I caught myself stepping back and away from the steps, clearing the way so that I could gawk at the odd figure as he moved past me and headed toward my room.
My eyes fastened onto the man and widened until the icy air watered them painfully.
He was enormous, in presence as well as body.
Something about him, even in his slouched, half-dead stature, reminded me of a cathedral: taller than anyone I’d ever seen with the build of something made of stone and an unmistakably haunting, damning energy.
Even in the state he was in, the air around him felt so filled with a spirit that it was a mere whisper away from unholiness… or possibly a step over.
His hair was as black as the sea beneath us, flopped over his eyes in long, frozen clumps. Skin nearly translucent, tinged a sickly gray—though bathed in the moonlight, everyone’s skin was cloaked in a bluish-silver.
The man turned his head. Scars littered his beardless face and neck. There was something mildly handsome about him despite the wild appearance. Deep goldenrod-yellow eyes locked with mine for a brief second before they moved about, quickly taking in the ship.
I gasped at the sight of his odd-colored eyes, and a shot of icy air filled my throat and chest so painfully I coughed. Never in my life had I seen eyes of that color. One look and you could see the world had shunned him. He looked to be halfway to death already.
The others must have gotten that sense, for when I met them below deck, they placed the man on my cot and hurried away as if they would catch the same fate.
Only Captain Sheamus and Mick remained behind.
There wasn’t enough space in the small closet-made-room for me to enter with the others, so I waited in the doorway and watched their silhouettes dance from the small tallow candle they had lit.
“How did you end up here, sir? What ship have you come from?” Captain Sheamus peppered the groaning man with questions.
“You don’t look so good, lad,” offered Mick. “My girl—Miss Bulkley, there you stand. Get the man a tot of grog, would you?”
I lifted the bottle and the few supplies the captain had ordered me to grab. My nerves lurched when I felt the man’s yellow eyes snap to me with sudden alertness.
“There she is; the man just needs to be warmed up!” said the captain. His enthusiastic words ricocheted off the walls of the tight space. Something in the way his eyes had landed on me made me feel like I was a target instead of a nurse; I didn’t wish to be either.
The captain peppered him with more questions that were met with incoherent groans or such silence that I wondered if he even spoke the same language.
I poured a bit of the cloudy-brown grog into a cup and stepped in, eager to ask him my own questions but prepared to hear nothing, as so far he had only grunted and groaned.
Mick moved out of the way, but my shoulder accidentally jabbed into the captain’s when he continued to stare at the man. Eventually, he took a step back, away from the bed, so I could hand him the cup.
Up close, he was horrid looking, like a monster made from the night.
There was something about him that caused me to recoil and reject him as though he were not the same species as me.
Below the horrible feeling, though, and beneath all the scars and uncomfortable pallor of skin, his sharp jawline, prominent cheekbones, and ridged nose held the clean lines of Apollo or the Borghese Gladiator—but with the darkness of Fuseli’s Satan.
Still, there was a repugnance about him that made me uncomfortable—something I’d never experienced before.
Scars—so many of them—marred his handsome, even godlike, features.
His shirt had opened slightly to reveal his neck and collarbone on one side.
Before he shifted and his shirt readjusted, I glimpsed his skin—in patches, large and small, of various colors; almost none seemed to match.
Had he had a different disposition, I think he might have reminded me of a calico cat.
I forced myself to steady when his hand, gnarled with what looked like burns, took the cup from my hands.
He lifted it to his lips and drained the liquid before handing the empty wooden cup back to me.
All the while, his yellow eyes watched me without even a blink.
“What in God’s name has happened to you?” Dr. Brox whispered next to me as he took in the man’s scars. I’d been so fixated and unnerved by the man’s stare that I had not noticed the doctor had entered.
Attempting to regain my bearings, I glanced around the dimly lit room, still feeling the stranger’s stare on my face.
“Why is the woman aboard your ship?”
Everyone in the room stilled at the assertive timbre.
The brig itself seemed to freeze for a moment.
The man’s voice was low and deep with slight hints of an accent that I couldn’t put my finger on.
Maybe Russian? But it didn’t have the same heavy undertones as I’d heard from my grandfather’s Russian acquaintances.
It was smooth and thick with curls of smoke and the threat of ancient curses.
Words sat in my throat and refused to leave.
After a moment of surprised silence, Mick answered. “You are aboard the Prometheus. We are currently on an exploratory expedition sent by the British Admiralty’s Hydrographic Office.” Mick cleared his throat. “Miss Clara Bulkley is the mission’s cartographer. Dr. Brox here is the medical adviser.”
Even in the shadows, I felt his cold yellow eyes return to me.
Captain Sheamus took a step forward. “I am Captain—”