with his head tilted back against the hatchway.
I pushed Abel's head from my own lap, and stood up. With Scape's wild expositions – what part dementia, and what part truth, I still could not determine – whirling in my head, I made my way towards my cabin below the deck.
An ambush was sprung upon me before I reached my destination. In the dark passageway, a pair of arms encircled my neck and pulled me off my feet.
Miss McThane's breath was warm against my face. 'I heard you talking,' she whispered in my ear. 'I was down in the hatchway, and I could hear you two.'
'Please-' I endeavoured to free myself. The white expanse of her throat, and the soft shapes below, seemed almost luminous in the dark. 'Please restrain yourself-'
'Hey-' Something wet touched the inside of my ear, startling me further; I was just able to discern the tip of her tongue withdrawing behind her salacious smile. 'Everything Scape told you – it's all true. Everything.'
'That – that may be-' The fervour of her embrace had expelled most of the air from my lungs. 'But-'
She threw her head back, the sharp points of her small teeth glinting fiercely. 'I got a brain out of the Future inside my head. This is the way it's gonna be some day – no more of that ladylike crap. In the Future, women are just gonna take what they want.' Her mouth swooped down upon me again, an eagle on its prey.
'God help us.' I broke free of her grasp, but was within seconds pinned against the door of my cabin.
Her voracious gaze locked into my eyes. 'Not just women,' she breathed. 'Women – men – everybody. It's all they'll think about – all the time.' Her panting breath became even more rapid. 'Not like you – you drive me crazy. You're so goddamn cold – unexcited – like a goddamn machine. You're the one that's clockwork.' Her eyes narrowed to slits. 'Well, all that's gonna change, right now. I can't stand it – get ready, sucker-'
The door sprang open behind me, and I fell backwards, tearing free of Miss McThane's embrace. This sudden event so took her by surprise, that there was time for me to scramble to my knees, slam the door shut, and brace my shoulder against it to prevent her entry.
She went away, after several minutes of repeated entreaties. I sat wearily on my bed, my head in my hands, appalled at this vision of the Future – a foreign country far from this one, where a person such as I would be as out of place as though lost in the Mongolian wastes. If what Scape had told me was true, then they would be different people, those residents of the Time to Come; different, and crueller, rending the flesh of their pleasures in their shining teeth.
So unnerving was this vision, that for a moment I thought I had at last become deranged. I looked up at a sound of grinding wood, and saw a stalk of glistening metal rising from the floor of my cabin. A brass flower blossomed at its end, and swivelled towards me.
A voice – familiar, unforgettable – spoke. 'Dower you are there?' The Brown Leather Man's words echoed hollow, as though coming through the tube from a great distance below.
13
It was no apparition, engendered by the collapse of my reason; I had undergone enough extraordinary experiences by this time, to have some confidence in determining what was actually happening.
A dark stain of sea-water oozed around the hole the brass stalk had bored through the cabin floor; the metal apparatus glistened damply as the flower-like terminus rotated about. 'Dower-' The voice came through it again. 'You are there? Approach this device, and answer me.'
It had risen to a height of a couple of feet from the floor. I knelt down and brought my mouth close to the brass flower. 'Here I am.'
The device ceased its rotation, the terminus pointing towards me. 'You know who is this?'
'Yes,' I whispered in reply.
'Good.' The Brown Leather Man's voice, coming through the stalk, shaded darker. 'Listen most closely. I can help you. These persons – your captors – from them you can escape. You can evade their fateful intentions.'
My heart sped when I heard these words. I had resigned myself to the – seemingly unavoidable – prospect of my own death. This was, perhaps, no more than the stoicism of the lamb being readied for slaughter, seeing no point in dashing itself against the unyielding limits of its pen. But had not this enigmatic figure, appearing when least expected, helped me to escape a grisly fate twice already? Though I could not imagine how it would be possible again, given the overwhelming numbers of the Godly Army surrounding us, yet I allowed a tremor of hope to quicken my pulse.
'Not now, but later,' continued the Brown Leather Man's voice. 'When dark it is, and these men are asleep. You must then meet me.' He described a point on the ship's deck, unlit and out of the sight of any sentries.
'But- but how can it be possible?' I asked, my lips nearly touching the cold, shining metal. 'How can-'
'Now, quiet,' ordered the voice. 'Explanations later. When we meet. Tell no one.' The brass flower folded in on itself, and the stalk drew back through the floor. The only evidence remaining of its singular apparition was the round hole, no bigger than a finger's width, and a trickle of sea-water. I pulled a small rag rug that had been near the bed over the spot to conceal it.
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
