This is a story I wrote in 1974 or 1975. I recently found a copy in the attic, reread it, and deemed it not unworthy.
The Third Time
Who I am is not important; the curious may find my name scrawled at the end of this tale. My trade, such as it is, is in words, the transcription of the world of boundless colour around me into dead monochrome, infinity into a series of straight lines. I live nowhere, and eke out my small living in wandering, sleeping rough where I must, easy where I can.
It is also unimportant how I came to be walking along that sanded shore with only the Moon for company and the sure knowledge that the nearest friendly face was so far away that it might have shone from the serene disc ahead. The only thing that is important is that this tale is written, even though I fear that there is something, someone, who does not wish it so, for twice before I have begun it, and have had to break off before it was finished, as the inchoate rush of memories still too close overwhelmed me. I never saw those pages again, though this, perhaps, was a consequence of my peculiar nomadic lifestyle, carrying my study - along with my kitchen and bedroom – in a pack on my back, vulnerable to weather and chance.
It is now four years since my last attempt, and six since the time of which I am about to write. I start again, then, knowing only too well what imps and demons lurk there in the shadows thirsting for freedom, waiting for me to grant them admittance to my consciousness: yet I am encouraged by the thought that, this time, secure in the Brighton home of a trusted friend and brother of my soul, there will be no need for me to stop until it is done. My room is spacious and airy, there are many hours of daylight ahead, and just a call away are people with food and drugs and comfort. I am ready.
It was a balmy night in early summer, the moon so bright and high that there were few stars. It was late, but I was not thinking of sleep. If I had been, there would have been no problem: I could have unrolled my bed anywhere in that silvered sweep before me and slept immediately a deep sleep lulled by the sound of the murmuring sea - a murmur I can hear now as I write, although the beach is out of sight and the windows are closed against the sound. There was no aim in my walking beyond enjoying the sound of the sand drifting beneath me, loving the way the night tugged and teased at all my senses: there was even a hint of salt in the air to thrill my tongue as I breathed it deep.
Another of my friends, an amateur astrologer, once told me that Neptune in the eighth house and the Sun in Scorpio accounted for my love of the sea, my fascination with it. I preferred to think of it, though, on nights such as this as an atavistic memory of its subtlety and grace springing from some fishy ancestor across uncountable links in the chain of genesis that had brought me to this place of quiet splashing and - distant weeping. I thought I must have misheard at first, mistaken the far-off sob of a gull for a human plaint. I stopped, listened hard: the waves whispered to me in spirit voices. I walked on. Then it came again, then once more, and there was no mistaking it this third time: it was a girl’s voice, maybe a woman’s, certainly that of someone in great distress.
Despite the heroic name that I bear in enduring memory to my parent’s bad judgment and misplaced hopes, I have no taste for errantry. Here, though, in this place of radiance and equilibrium, there could surely be no danger to me, and my decision was made for me by another cry, much louder, that set me running towards the rocks whence the sound had unmistakably come.
The rocks were an outpost of the low cliffs that framed the bay, cropping out of the sand just below high water mark. When I got close, I stopped, suddenly unsure; I was panting, and the blood rushed a storm in my ears. The sound came again, quieter now, and to my left. I set down my rucksack and climbed one of the smooth slippery stones that was a little higher than the others to scout my way.
Below we, trapped in a basin of rock, was a large tidal pool, striped like the shifting sea by the light of the Moon, but perfectly still. Phosphorescent fishes flicked green at me from just below the surface. On the other side of the pool I could just make out a dark shape huddled on a ledge, unmoving and silent as the rearing rock that shaded it from the moon, but indisputably alive. How I could be so certain I do not know, save that, as I looked around for a way of skirting the pool, I glimpsed from the corner of my eye an aura, a hazy turquoise mist, so diffuse that it was almost not there at all, hovering over the place where the shape lay.
It was a hard and slippery way around the rim of the pool, much harder than it had looked. At times it even felt like some will was trying to prevent me reaching my goal.
- I had to stop writing then, my hands would not be still. As I approached the memory of what I found, along a path no less arduous than the one I slithered over that night, I could sense again those nameless things lurking at the fringes; I could hear the dinning crescendo of the waves tugging me. In a sudden fit of terror, I screamed aloud, and my friend came at once with sympathy and solidity and a pipe of sweet opium. I can face it now, though I am still aware of the tendrils of sea sound tapping away at my window pane.
I did not realise how close I was until I almost stumbled over her. Looking back across the still water to my erstwhile vantage point it did not seem more than twenty or thirty feet away, yet it had taken me many minutes, during which I more than once lost sight of the water, or the the cliff, or both together, to reach this place. She lay on her side, half in and half out of the pool, her arms bent in front of her, her back towards me. I dug out a packet of vestas from my trouser pocket and struck one.
In its flare, I saw that she was naked. Her skin was the iridescent while of mother of pearl, and strands of kelp were tangled in her dark hair, My first thought was that she was drowned, and my second, ludicrously enough, was to call for help where I knew there was none. I bent over to look more closely. A slight rise and fall showed that she still breathed. Then I noticed high up on her back a dark trickle. Gingerly, I pulled aside her hair and found, high up at the back of her neck, a wound that was still slowly seeping blood.
Before, I had felt only a vague helplessness and, at the back of my mind of my mind, a faint unease - I had only seen her back, but it was young and pleasantly rounded and complected, and the fact that I was compromisingly alone with a helpless lady miles from nowhere had occurred to me. Now, though, there was something I knew I could do. I shook out the match and set about cleaning her wound, bathing it with handfuls of the still-warm water in the pool. It was not as bad as I had first thought, not a gash or tear, but rather the sort of bruised scrape you might get by banging against the rounded rocks.
I soaked a handkerchief to clean off the blood on her back, but before I could apply it, she stirred. I sat back, plunged into fresh unease at this unexpected turn of events. With a grace and fluency of movement that astounded me - and showing no trace of discomfort or difficulty from whatever it was that had laid her low - she sat up and swivelled towards me. I had time - little enough in fact, but lengthened in my memory by what came after - to see a pale oval face, eyes shining dark and far away like treasure in the depths, lips glistening and parted, showing sparkling teeth and and a thick, wet tongue, hair cascading over her breasts in black waves. All this in the moment before her swivelling movement ran to its completion, and with a heart-stopping wet slapping sound, she brought herself fully out of the water and on to the ledge. Her lower body was a smooth cylinder tapering to a fork, the whole from the waist down covered in scales of sparkling silver-grey. I swooned.
I could have ended the story there, I suppose. God knows how much I wish it. It has some substance, the drama and imagery are competently handled. I’ve sold far worse. I’ve read it over and over these past two hours, changing a word or two, fiddling with the syntax, anything to put off carrying on. At my request, my friend has been in again and tacked a blanket over the window to muffle the intrusive sounds of outside. Despite my procrastinations, despite my fears, I must carry on, for no other reason that it did NOT end there, for this is not one of my imagination’s tales that can be neatly rounded at my whim, this is real and ragged, this is experience: like my absurd name, it is mine, mine alone, and I must cling to it as a drowning man to a floating spar.
Salt and sweet corruption, a warm liquidity. The sea was in my mouth. I opened my eyes and dark waves cascaded around my face. I could feel that thick pink tongue exploring my mouth like an inquisitive mollusc, slowly probing, could feel it bore into my soul, take root, feel the sex rising in my blood. I clung to her, and her to me - her skin like warm sand at the water’s edge - and we rolled over so that I was on top. My bare legs slid along that scaly cylinder and found, not the mucilaginous disgust of slabfish, but a velvety smoothness like snakeskin. Her arms clung tight around me and those dark and lustrous eyes locked on mine, draining what remained of my will; as my body slid along hers I felt the slight ridge beneath me give way to softness there, a pliancy, yielding yet fixed, silky and warm like the waters of a tidal pool. I hesitated - ah, not long! - on the brink. She pulled my face down on to hers. I closed my eyes and plunged in.
Rushing, a swift descent, pressure building, then rising to plummet again, a dismasted ship tossed on a swell, cleaving the angry waters, the screams of its crew in my ears as it succumbed to the storm, sunk tangled in the maidenhair of the dark night, lights extinguished, down ever down; a great whale festooned with harpoon dragging its lines behind, seeking its doom in the depths.
A second time I broke surface, opened my eyes, struggled to be free. Her arms bound me like steel hoops, and her eyes filled my sight, the last light I would ever see, a phosphorescent greenness lurking there. I pushed my self up away from her, but she arched up beneath me, that cloacal fishy hole gripping my throbbing sex, pressure building. I heard a song, a lulling siren song that sapped me. A tension: the pull was too much for me, and I went under for the third time, and touched bottom, my bulging eyes full of the glints and glimmers of the swallowed treasures of the seabed, a ruptured galleon, the gash in its side showing brassbound chests burst open to reveal strange jewels.
I flailed my arms and my right hand closed over something round and damp and too solid to be her flesh. A heavy pebble. I picked it up, blood streaming from my nose, pain in my ears, drowning, drowning. My muscles tensed, beyond my control, yet I clasped it and managed to bring it down not once, but many times on the wracked head beneath my own. A scream bubbled from her sucking mouth into mine and the pressure in me exploded out through my loins. As it ebbed, my blows grew lest frenzied, petered out. My eyes opened as her lips released mine, and closed again to shut out the thing I had done; an ineffectual gesture, as that bloodied tangle of hair and splintered bone burned itself on my memory. Even now I can see it if I close my eyes, giving me no rest save that induced by sleeping draughts.
There is little more to tell, to confess. I lay exhausted until the incoming tide lapped over into the pool, then struggled to my feet, gathered up my clothes and stumbled and waded my way to the shelter of the cliffs, to lie at last in a cool cave out of the reach of the ocean, which was no longer the conversational friend of the night before: its aspect had changed, and I could no longer trust it, knew surely that although I had escaped it this time, it would surely and implacably seek my out, for I had violated and destroyed its daughter. As I watched, it found her smashed body, caressed it, bent and broke over it, then bore it away, the swirling spume of its salt tears carried by the wind to burn on my face.
My body got up and left that place, but what happened there has tracked me ever since. I had to come here, as close by the shore as I dared, to write about it, to leave it behind me, my only hope. And I can no longer hear the waves outside the window. I haves won, I am here, it is done! My head hurls back in sudden wild laughter. Yes! I have won, my frame shakes with the triumph of it, all the poisons that gnaw me purged, spewed on to the sheets before me. And my eyes, open wide with glory, look down and see my hands as they grasp the pages, pen gripped tight in surging of relief, see the blood trickling between the fingers of my clenched fist that opens like a flower of hell confronting the fire, and shows me its map of gore and hair, in which I trace the final meeting. And as I begin to walk that path I can hear, growing like a marching band coming over the hill, soft and rhythmic and full of music, approaching inexorably, banners unfurled, can hear growing the clamour of the sea.
I hear it calling and I must go to it.
Galahad Lethbridge
