Infernal Devices - KW Jeter [94]
At the, appointed hour, when all the ship was asleep save for the single watch stationed at the prow, I slipped from my cabin and made my stealthy way to the deck. My passage went undetected in the night's darkness, and soon enough I was crouched down among the coils of rope and other nautical gear, hidden from all but the most thorough search.
I waited in nervous anticipation for the Brown Leather Man's arrival, The slap of waves and the answering creak of the ship's timbers were all that I could hear; the cloudless heavens scattered points of lights upon the troughs and crests of the ocean's expanse.
His journey to the spot was even more surreptitious than my own, though it included – as I was shortly to learn – his clambering up the side of the ship and over the rail, I was unaware of his presence until a hand touched my shoulder from behind and his voice whispered my name. Thus startled, I whirled about; his hand clapped over my mouth before any outcry could reveal our meeting. "Yet be quiet," he commanded softly.
"Where – where have you been hiding?" I asked when his stifling hand had been drawn away. "You've been aboard all this time?"
He gestured for me to lower my voice further. The moon and stars glinted from his dark face and shoulders, still wet from the sea. "To me listen," he said. "There is little time, and much to tell."
Thereupon followed, as I knelt close to his soft voice, the exposition I herewith summarize. Even if I succeeded in reproducing his exact words (minus my own exclamations of surprise, which rather lengthened the discourse), I would still fail to convey the eerie wonderment evoked by his narration.
He told me his real name, but the human voice lacks the facility to properly pronounce so strange a cognomen; I continued to identify him in my mind as I had done when he had first entered my London shop. He claimed and it was soon enough proven to me, banishing any residual scepticism I might have harboured – to be the last surviving member of an amphibious race, at home in the depths of the seas rather more than upon dry land. His people were the basis for the various tales and legends of "selkies" common to the Scottish islands. In support of this point, he demonstrated to me that what I had taken to be his brownish skin, was in fact a thin, pliable covering – a species of leather indeed, though marine in origin constructed to hold a layer of salt-water, essential to his survival, around his body; the marks that I had taken to be scars in the manner of African tribesmen were the finely worked stitches holding this garment together.
The Brown Leather Man continued from the singular to the general, his discourse forming a natural history of his race. Never very numerous and always secretive, the selkies – to use the most convenient term – maintained through the long years a few friendly contacts with human beings; the various sailors' yarns of miraculous rescues from ships lost at sea had this basis in reality. As befit their piscine physiology, the selkies' reproductive processes were external, fertilization and growth of the resultant embryos taking place in large beds of seaweed; these sites, the only ones suitable, were located in the waters off the island of Groughay. Unfortunately, the activities of mankind had a disastrous effect upon the situation. Readers of sufficient age may recall that, towards the end of the previous century, a lucrative boom in the trade of seaweed occurred. It was gathered in large quantities from the shores of the distant Scottish islands, charred into a soft black substance, and distributed throughout Britain for use as a fertilizer. (Readers familiar with contemporary agricultural practices will be aware that other, more productive substances have supplanted the seaweed for this purpose; there is virtually no trade in it at the present time.) One of those who had profited from the market for seaweed had been the young head of the clan based upon Groughay, Lord Bendray. He had sought to accelerate the process of turning