The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [223]
oaths are signed or broken in sweat and flesh and seed and soil on this night, in that storm, in the dark, on the beach in the briny tide or secreted in bushes, under trees or in mossy hiding places among the rocks? Although the steam and fog and the rain that lashes the earth with thick ropes of water all collaborate to foreshorten our visibility to what seems little more generous a distance than is measurable by an arm outstretched before a face, a ship has been spotted out at sea. A huge ship, a man-o’-war, it’s like a floating wooden castle. Its ripped sails flutter helplessly behind it. The ship rollicks in the waves and wind, tossed about as easily as a toy boat in a bathtub. Its sides creak and groan with strain, every element of its architecture cracking and splintering, threatening to snap in a hundred places. The ship is singed with St. Elmo’s fire. The deck, the bowsprit, the ropes and masts tingle with flame; shivers of electricity run all over every surface of the ship. The deck’s a scramble of frenzied activity. The sailors jettison things overboard, casks and barrels and crates. They yank at the ropes and pulleys and wheels, they run and slip and fall on the deck, clamber to their feet, slip and fall again. We watch from the shore as the sailors aboard the ship begin to dive off the deck into the water. The rain crashes down with renewed ferocity, then slowly starts to deliquesce. The wind softens a little. The sailors who jumped off the deck of the ship begin to struggle ashore. One by one they wash up on the beach, half-dead with exhaustion from their desperate dives and swims to safety. Their fingers claw at the sand. They stumble toward land, their boots slogging through the knee-high water. They crawl ashore, spitting out mouthfuls of saltwater, chests heaving, clothes sopping, and collapse on the beach. Crabs skitter around their bodies. A foamy film of tide licks at their feet, receding, returning, receding. The storm clears. The rain slows to a dribble, and then a patter, and then we cannot tell if it is still raining or if all we are hearing is water dripping to the ground from the puddles collected in the recesses of leaves and the funnels of flowers. The light changes: the stars disappear, though the sky does not brighten much. The quality of light in the sky is a deep muddy red underpainted with green and gold. The sky is not cloudy, but thick with mist. It is like a dawn on another planet, as if we are seeing the sunrise of another star, in another galaxy, on a world where an atmosphere composed of alien elements causes luminiferous effects unfamiliar to our eyes. The light is not bright, but it is light enough for the people to see around them. The birds in the trees begin to sing strange songs. The people look at the birds and do not recognize them, for they are not earth birds. These birds look half-dinosaur. Even the smattering of bird-watchers and ornithologists who happen to be in the audience are baffled by these birds, who seem to fall into unreal or unknown taxonomic slots falling perhaps somewhere between the cockatoo and the pterodactyl. The plants here are unrecognizable, too. The botanists who happen to be in the audience are amazed and even frightened, for they do not recognize them. Maybe they are prehistoric plants. They are plants with softly undulating slime-coated prehensile fingers, snapping carnivorous mouths, sensory appendages that seem to see and hear as distinctly as our own eyes and ears. These vegetables are almost animal in the immediacy of their movements, their quick responses to external stimuli, the strange emotiveness of their rooted bodies. We are in the valley of the uncanny. Some change has happened to the people’s minds, too. They are thinking like children. The forest smells thick and wild and sweet—full of blood, milk, fire, liquor, sap. The air is wet and heavy. The plants, the water, the rocks: everything surges and breathes with an inner intelligence, a kind of half-sentient consciousness, everything is internally animated with spirits. Like the world