Prologue to The Night Surfer by Alpheus Williams
The story takes place on a white-stuccoed wall. The characters and action are painted in shadow. Amma and the boy are alone. His parents have gone out for evening. Amma has been planning for weeks. She has a basket filled with bits of paper, leaves, feathers, twigs, shapes and figures. She has practised and rehearsed the scenes in her mind and now it’s show time. The light from the fire flutters across the wall. Amma’s undulating dulcet tones provide the narrative, and the flickering flame from the peat fire breathe life to the shadows as the stories unfold.
The fire is warm and the room in redolent with the sweet marshy earthiness of burning peat. The shapes take place on the wall in the flickering light. Amma works her magic with fingers, hands, bits of string, leaves and stiffened paper.
He watches wide-eyed as the events take place. His heart beats quickly, and he looks over his shoulder, checking, making certain they are alone. He knows that he is privileged to see these secret things, to hear these secret stories. He has sworn with his hand over his heart and his eyes screwed shut into darkness that he will not speak of it to his parents.
They have gone to a dance. His mother excited, his father acquiescent. She wore a new dress and did her hair. He wore his suit, waistcoat, tweed cap and trimmed his moustache. They had been planning their outing for weeks, as had Amma.
There on the wall painted in shadow, moving as if in an ocean current…a mountain of ice! An iceberg! And beneath the surface a castle. A city of crystal. The castle where the secret folk live, the immortals, the faery folk, the magical folk, the Daoine Sidhe, deep beneath the hulking floating ice mountain way way to the north in the cold cold sea. The Fin Folk.
She drops her body before the fire, her shawl closes up and the scene begins to change. Her hands create transitions, fuzzy images on the wall, the rushing wings, a conspiracy of ravens launch into hysterical and frantic flight. The scene changes to beneath the surface, a city of ice, with watery passage ways, and finny creatures.
And here years ago they lived in castles beneath the sea, with walls of ice and windows of blue tinted crystal. The enchanted ones would sleep forever and a day and only wake to visit mortals for their own amusement. Scream to the wind and cry to the rain if these days are gone and these castles are empty!
My people lived far to the north where it gets very cold indeed. And the water becomes ice and air becomes mist. Life is hard and light is short and darkness last for days, weeks and months and the sky is lit at night with dancing bands of light that sweep across the sky in such richness and beauty that they forever tattoo themselves upon the heart of any who gaze upon them.
And the boy finds it hard to believe that a place exists where night lasts for such a long time; a place where the ocean freezes into continents of ice and there are fine cities of great wealth and beautiful creatures.
Amma waves her hand before the flame and a different place and time appears on the wall. And now on the wall, a fishing boat, long, narrow and lean bobbing and rocking on a gentle sea.
There is a fisher, a young man, brash and silly who fancies himself for sure. He fishes alone and works hard. He spends hours out to sea in his boat and catches many fish. He makes a reputation as a young man of wealth. He is long, hard and strong, but stingy and mean. There is little room in his heart for any other than himself. One day when pulling in his catch, he discovers a young seal pup caught up his net. He is sorely angry. He doesn’t care to share his catch or the sea with other men let alone creatures. From his currach he hears the protesting barks and pleas of the seal herd. Piteous it is and would tear at the heart of most hardened of men. The soft brown pleading eyes and plaintive cries make ne’er a dent on the fisher. The fisher scoffs and quick as a flitter, he pulls out his knife, long, shiny and honed to a quick and deadly edge. He slits the critter’s throat and tosses it over the gunnels. The sea turns red. Gulls circle above and the seal heard cries out in anguish.
He sets out early the next day. The mist is on the water but the sea is flat and calm. He rows to his secret site where a black rock rises above the surface and the sea laps gently at its edge. It’s a fine place for herring and a place that always rewards him with heavy nets of glittering shiny fish. The fisher sits in the stern and pulls at his nets and there encounters a woman of rare beauty.
Amma’s voice brings colour to the shapes and shadows. A woman of ivory skin and eyes as blue as the near frozen sea sits on a rocky outcrop, the white swell surging around her feet like the train on a virgin bride’s wedding dress. The pale mists enfolds her, a cloak of shifting winds and breezes. Her red hair falls along a slender neck and the young fisher feels his pulse quicken. His loins surge with a greedy carnal hunger.
The porcelain head turns on the slender neck and the icy blue eyes spear him like a lance. Her lips part and she sings to him, sweet, sad and seductive. His mind and heart row towards the rocky outcrop. The white-fringed water coils over the sharp hungry teeth of the razored rocks beneath his currach. The thin skin of his boat scrapes over the rocks and opens his craft from stem to stern like a gutted a fish. The lady of the froth laughs musically and blows a fine dust from the palm of her hands into the fisher’s gaping eyes. His eyes sting with fire. He squeezes them shut. He is overcome with a burning darkness.
In blind horror he hears her soft dulcet song as cold water rushes into his boat. The seals bark in the distance like an appreciative audience. Above him a sharp chorus of gulls sing out for supper.
The following morning, the sea spews his body on a stony beach. A squabble of gulls circle over the rocky shore, a cacophony of cries, as they spiral down for dinner. The village crone, withered, bent and raven-eyed, knows the signs. She knows the old ways and is skilled in such things. She sounds the alarm and the village priest and a small group of people swarm down to the ocean’s edge. The priest and others wait deferentially for the hunched backed hag to make her reading. The young fisher lies face down on the stony beach, his hands stretched out before him as if he were diving into the earth. A young seal pup with a gaping slice across its throat lies next to him. The crone pulls back the shuttered lids of the seal pup and, with eyes that can thread needles by firelight, she sees the angry image of the fisher on its pupils. She flutters quickly to the face down body of the fisher. She turns his face to the pale sun. His lids are squeezed closed. The crone looks to the sea, shuts her eyes and says the words that must be said. She looks into his face and peals back the eyelid with a thumb and forefinger. And there on the fisher’s pupil, only for her to see, is the smiling image of the lady of mist imprinted on his eyes.
She makes the sign against the evil eye and the priest is called to say the words that will free the fisher’s soul from the enchanted. The priest says the holy words over the prostrate fisher. The wind whispers above them. Sleet drops from the sky. Cold milky mist envelops them. To sea beyond their sight, from cold swirling vapour, an enchanted song rides in over the gentle swells. They shiver. Men with shoulders strong and hardened from pulling at the oars in stubborn seas feel the shudder in their hearts. They know of such things.
None were fond of the young fisher. Still, they are men of the sea and the right and proper thing must be done. They shoulder his body and carry him to the village. The priest and the rest follow behind. No one turns a head. No one looks behind. The waves break and surge to the body of the young seal pup and suck it out to deep water. The sea reclaims it own. The hag waits at the sea’s edge and whispers the right and proper words. Things are set aright.
Amma shakes her head and the wall blurs again. Sometimes great harm and sometimes great fortune. Amma begins again.
Once a long time ago…
A fisher was lost at sea. He leaves behind a young wife and a young daughter. And now that he is gone, they have to fend for themselves. Mother and daughter are poor and their home is simple. The girl works hard at her chores and provides great comfort to her mother. She walks light upon the earth and appreciates the value and worth of all living things. She and her mother are humble. They make do with what they have.
It is a hard life, for sure. They walk down to the shore and gather seaweed. The widow and girl carry the heavy baskets up a steep hill to their cottage. They spread it on their garden to nourish potatoes, onions and greens. The girl walks barefoot in the cold water to collect cockles and mussels. The girl grows into a woman of a singular strange and wind wild beauty. She attracts the eye of all the young men.
One day as she collects cockles along the shore, she looks out to see a great wave forming. She runs through the shallows as fast as she can. She runs and runs but cannot run quickly enough. She is swallowed up and gone. Her mother keens and sobs to the sea, air and earth. The priest comes to the site in his dark robes and crosses and sprinkles it with holy water and fine Latin words. Young men who desired her and loved her and would have fought to the death for her hand openly weep at her loss. The entire village mourns.
At night the owl hoots eleven times plus one and all in the village know that she sleeps in an icy watery grave. The sea will wash away her soft creamy flesh and bleach the blue from her fetching eyes. She will be scoured away to pale bone.
Once a year the mother returns to the site on the date of the day that she was lost. She tosses into the waiting waves sea kale, mouse ear and small delicate flowers that peak out amongst the grasses twined into a wreath of grief. And it bobs and floats towards the empty horizon and the setting sun and disappears. On this day the mother keens well into the night until her heart swells and hurts and almost breaks. Eleven years plus one go by.
And in the eleventh year plus one of her going, the mother appears at the date of the day with wreath of grief. The sky is dark, rain falls in stinging sheets and the sea is the colour of smoky slate. The mother grieves today as she has everyday for eleven years plus one. She flings the wreath into the restless sea and waits. The wreath doesn’t move. It sets still on the surface of the tumultuous sea. A sharp intake of breath and a hand, pale and wet, reaches from the depths and clutches the wreath. The old woman, and she is old because grief has made her old well before her time, screams in the wind.
An arm and body follow the hand, and a woman of such singular strange and wind wild beauty emerges from the blue slate sea. And…she’s as young and as fresh as the day she left. She is not alone. She holds the hand of a young girl with raven locks and sea ice eyes, a quick-eyed child of deep and magical beauty. Along side her is a man of surpassing handsomeness, upright and strong with fierce and noble features.
And the mother knows that the Fin Man has taken her daughter to wife to live with him in his castle under the ice. Her daughter glides from sea like wind on the water. She embraces her mother and the embrace is cold and icy. She places a heavy sack of silver and gold in her mother’s hand and tells her not to grieve. She wipes the tears from her cheeks with an icy finger and instructs her mother to build a house on the hill overlooking the sea. The mother does. At night she sits by the fire and looks out her fine windows on moonlit nights for her daughter and granddaughter. And they visit her when the moon is full and lights a silver trail on the surface of the sea.
The widow becomes very old and one moonlit night her daughter comes for her and takes her to the castle in the ice and there she finds her long lost husband. And forever and a day they live with their beautiful daughter, their grandchild and the Fin Man.
And young Frankie, believe me, forever and a day is a very very long time indeed.
And then…Amma’s head arches and turns like a crow considering breakfast, her eyes sharpen and quick as a twinkle she tosses the contents of the basket into the fire. It flares and licks at the magic and disappears before the door opens. His mother and father come into the room, fresh cheeked and lively from a night of dancing. And none the wiser for the secret stories told in their absence.
Amma pats his hands and softly whispers that there will be other dances and other times for stories and learning. And so there will.
* * *
He has the dream. It troubles him because it’s a dream that he hasn’t had for a long time. Now as sickness bleaches him, dries him, withers him to a thin papery husk, he throws his arms over his knees and clutches his wrist in trembling hands. He tightens his arms, pulling his knees in closer against his chest until the stinging sweat in his eyes feels good compared to the rest of it. Again, the dream. But he loses it, goes delirious. He’s not certain whether it’s a dream or a waking memory. It frightens him because when he has the dream he knows he is looking into the vast maw of eternity. It comforts him for the same reason.
* * *
The shawl is black. She made it with her own hands. He has seen her knit, needles whirring and clicking, long sharp flashes before his eyes, his own sweater, cap and socks in red wool, green wool and white wool. But the shawl is black and was knitted long before he was born. It has cables, interwoven Nordic borders, and starfish, shells, fish, and long stemmed flat leaves like those that are cast up by the sea in storm. The blackness of shawl shields the designs from human eyes. It becomes blurred and fuzzy like faith and reason. If you want to learn, you have to touch. Skim your fingertips light like a butterfly over the woollen designs, the dimples, dips, rises and mounds. Close your eyes. Read carefully like the blind and you’ll see far more in Amma’s shawl. She says that they are magic symbols, magic words that will charm the wild things, watery things, and the fin people. She always wears the shawl. Sometimes in bad weather she pulls it up over her head and it makes her look magical, mysterious, witchlike. She wears it because she is a widow. She is in mourning. She has been in mourning since the boy can remember. The boy wonders whom she mourns. He doesn’t think it is her husband. The boy is too young to have such doubts, but he heard it from his father. He heard it in the dark whispers of night after his mother and father made their mattress sing, and his mother stifles screams of pleasure and giggles as the wind skitters about the eaves like a plague of twittering swallows.
Whispers slither through the walls and beneath the spaces of closed doors. The boy hears them. Ponders them. Files them in his young head for another day.
His dad’s deep dulcet whisper, “he weren’t me dad…no…and everyone knows it…but they pretend not to.”
“So who was your dad?” his mother’s languid voice, soft, satiated and sleepy.
“A fairy! But he weren’t no ordinary fairy… he were a sea fairy!” whispers his father and they giggle softly in the night like naughty children.
Little boys are haunted by things in the night, things that moan and call out to them, things that are hidden in the forest and the trees and beneath the long stemmed barley. Things bubble and burp in the peat bogs at night and disturb the far off cows and sheep and set them to lowing and bleating in the darkness. Things keep a boy’s eyes open at night, keen and wary with anticipation. At this time of night after the passion ride of his parents, after their naughty sensual whispers, and all is quiet, he hears his mother’s soft breathing and his father’s low porcine snoring. These sounds fade into the background walls of the house and the whispers of those far off things whistle against his window and titter at his door.
Some in the village whisper things, their heads down, eyes averted, shoulders shielding intrusion from others. Hushes and secrets. They say Amma’s a witch. They believe it. They really do. They fear her too. They really do. Some craft ancient druidic signs with fingers to ward away the evil eye and protect them from spells and charms. The more enlightened think she’s eccentric.
In this dream, in this memory, she clutches the top of the blackthorn walking stick, poking the ground and securing her purchase, her other hand grasps the hand of a young boy. They walk stooped with the wind at their backs pushing them along the steep grass tufted headland. Blades of grass pushed flat to the ground, wet and slippery under foot. Her hair blows out in front of her face flapping against her cheeks. She throws the woollen shawl over her head and laughs out loud. The wind drowns the music of her laughter to a tiny soft murmur but still loud enough for the boy to hear. He takes comfort in that. She holds his small hand firmly in hers and the little boy feels the strength and commitment in her tenacious fingers. Hers are clever hands. They knit and sew. The bones of her hands are like bird bones, fine and light and capable of flight. When she tells him tales, she uses them to etch out the outlines of fairies, banshees, goblins and mysterious sea folk that live beneath the bothered surface of the oceans. They are delicate hands and look fragile like fine china. But appearances deceive, even at his young age it astounds him how strong they are. Milky white hands on the verge of becoming old, a liver spot here and there freckle their surface and the knuckles and joints are beginning to take on size.
She moves under moody slate skies, the clouds dark and bruised, swaybacked and swollen bellied. She takes him to the edge of the earth that drops off into tumultuous seas. Rolling waves ragged, scarred and dimpled to living jade. Frothy white veils of elfin hair shoot out behind the rolling crest of swells as they race towards them, slamming and hammering onto the rocky headlands and stony beach below. The rain comes pounding in torrents pelting their hunched backs like pebbles thrown by vicious children.
She takes him down the steep incline, picking her way with her stick. Amma laughs in the wild anarchy of storm and they find shelter from the wind and pelting rain. Out of the wind she turns to him and holds him in her arms, just a little boy surrounded and embroiled in nature’s tempestuous temper. Amma revels in it. Her lips pull back in a warm smile and her cheekbones sharpen. The rain beads and glistens in her hair like a diadem beneath her magical black shawl. Her lazuli eyes glitter with scattered fairy lights.
Hard to imagine at times beneath this violence was a world under a crystal dome, with magic cities of enormous wealth and beauty where the Fin People lived. There, they took the lone children into their cold embrace and swam them down to immortality. It was true. True as his Amma had said, but it sang and rang of the devil’s work and that was true as well. True as his mum had said.
His mother sang the song of the black robed priest. His Amma sang of something else all together. She would take him on walks along the land that ran along the sea. And her birdlike fingers would fly before the sky and trace her thoughts and beliefs to him:
There was a time when people read the earth and sea. They read the flight of creatures of wing. They touched skin and scale, fur and feather and divined the weather and the way of things with their fingertips.
They read the lichen that grew on stony surfaces. They read the moss and textured tree bark. They read troughs in the sea swells and brooding hulking bulks of clouds and translated their resonant rumblings and electric luminescence into words and meaning.
They divined the world like bent backed hoary haired crones reading the glistening entrails of a sacrificed fowls. They felt its dimpled skin, watched its rippled surface. And it sang to them and they heard its song.
People forgot the ways of the world but his Amma remembered. She walked the stony earth beneath the hammering rain and chilling wind, her acetylene eyes riveted on the surface of the water. Jewelled droplets shimmered on her skin and studded her hair with glistening crystals.
He feared the sea. Like a crystal orb held before him, the sea prophesised his end. Whipping out, running wildly towards land to crash into sprays and scatter droplets on the slate stone and pebbles. Then retreating, turning stones end over end, clicking beneath the white surge like clapping claws.
Suddenly. Amma cocks her head to one side, a birdlike movement, listening to something just beneath the torrent of hammering water and whistling wind and thudding rain. A sound, a shriek, a wail, a long keening cry on the wind and the water and then a song so sweet, so sad and so seductive that it reaches out and traps the heart. She takes the black shawl from her shoulders and wraps him snugly. The moment is leaden with expectation and the air is filled with ozone, salt and iodine. She places her cool lips to his forehead and smiles. Her lapis acetylene eyes freeze him to a stone seat raised above the incoming tide. He cannot move.
She turns from him. A wave builds and approaches the rock platform and in its froth the boy sees the figures emerge through the glassy milk swells. Standing on the rocks. Figures surrounded and clothed in pale gossamer, ribbed, ragged, fabric fluttering in the wind. It radiates with silvery luminance against the dark angry clouds behind. His grandmother looks to the boy then turns towards the figures in the mist and the rain. The songs seduce him but he cannot move. He sees the swells rushing towards land and casting white frothy violence upon the stones but the shapes are indifferent and upright in the surge. They hold out their arms to her. It is sanctuary and home. Amma swift and light with the tumult and torrent flies into their arms and vanishes with a crashing wave of snowy whiteness.
They find him there the following morning. The sun shining on the water, the great swells, smoothed, steep and glassy. The wind is still. The sky, punctuated with acrobatic white winged gulls, is clear. The songs vanished.
His father mutters in anger, shaking his head, picking up the boy and carrying him back to the village and they never of speak of Amma, the mad Nordic witch again, his mother, his son’s grandmother.
With care and reverence, the boy folds the magic shawl and hides it beneath his mattress.
The boy is taken to the black robed priest and all the magic and sorcery and evil is exorcised from him in a language foreign to his ear and punctuated with incense that burns his eyes and makes them water. His eyes will water like the surface of a still pond from then on end and no one will ever speak to him of the black shawlled lady. All will forget except him. The boy with the magic shawl hidden beneath his mattress will remember.
That was so long ago and the man doesn’t know whether it happened or not. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a dream or a memory. What matters is that he knows its meaning.
Alpheus Williams, curmudgeon, pagan, pantheist, loves nature, dogs, good whisky, lives and writes in a small coastal village in Australia with his wonderful wife and their border collie. His work has appeared in The Molotov Cocktail Winners Anthology, Barren Magazine, Storgy, The Write Launch, The Fabulist Magazine, Phantom Drift, Shotgun Honey, Bristol Noir, Bath Flash Fiction, et al. He has been long listed on Bath Flash Fiction, Wigleaf long list. Two stories have been nominated for Push Cart Prize 2021.
The free sample above is a prologue to his work The Night Surfer, which was published in 2012. It is currently available as an ebook through most outlets (such as Amazon and Booktopia).
Find Alpheus at www.seasongchronicle.com!