Driftwood

But walking down the central aisle amidst concussive refrains, he suddenly felt a familiar presence, a feeling that was at once comforting and disconcerting. He stopped, looked around at massive columns and timeworn pews, then felt a shimmering in the air and saw that lights were flickering. Then he noticed the temperature inside the cathedral was now much colder - so cold in fact that vapor escaped his mouth when the breath he had been holding slipped past his lips.

And the people, the people he had just seen under the transept - were gone.

Only the music remained, yet now the sharp, penetrating notes of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto Number Three filled the air, and it was obvious the keyboardist was a master. Suddenly drawn to the music, he dashed through the choir and over to the organ, and stood watching in awe as the organist, an overweight, middle-aged man, flew through the piece without a single sheet of music in view. The organist and his instrument were as one, and the man suddenly had the very odd impression that the organist was none other than Bach himself. Looking the scene over, he noted the organist was certainly dressed for the part!

And it was then, too, that he noticed the organist was playing by candlelight. Indeed, looking around the inside of the church he observed that the only light in the cathedral was coming from hundreds of burning candles, and that now the air was brutally cold.

He turned, walked back through the choir and down the aisle to the massive entry doors and pushed them open. There was snow everywhere he looked, vast expanses of pristine, knee deep snow, and it was falling at a heavy rate. He looked across the plaza toward the Getreidegasse and saw not one street light burning, not one open shop, and feeling an edge of panic pushing inward he trudged off through the snow and made his way back toward the hotel.

He'd never in his life felt air as cold as this, and he struggled against the weight of the snow and the sudden force of an unexpected wind - a gale that seemed to suck the air right out of his lungs. He paused to catch his breath and could just hear the last refrains of Bach's concerto dying in the wind, so he looked back toward the cathedral, and around the plaza. The same shimmering air he had seen inside the cathedral filled the plaza, then a sensation very similar to vertigo came upon him, and he felt an unseen force grab hold and push him to the ground, and then all was black.

+++++

He was standing before a brightly lit shop window - it had to be an art gallery because the only thing in view was an ornately framed oil painting. He turned, looked around but all he could see was an inky blackness that enveloped everything beyond the gallery window. The vertiginous effect was complete, and nausea wracked his body.

And worst of all, his hands were bitterly cold, and he looked at them with sudden concern. They were white, almost frostbitten, and there was ice on the tops of his hands, but now, inexplicably, the air was almost impossibly hot. He looked down at his shoes and saw melting ice from them, and he noticed snow tucked into the cuffs of his slacks as well. Still, he couldn't see the street, or any ground at all beneath his feet for that matter, only the same inky blackness that surrounded the gallery window.

He wanted to turn and run, but then the thought struck him - there was nowhere to run "to"... it was almost as if his body was adrift in deep space. The feeling of vertigo grew overwhelming, enveloping him completely, and bile-tinged panic gripped his heart as he felt his stomach heave.

He turned, looked at the painting in the window, regained some semblance of place and began to calm down. Then he saw a star reflected in the window, or what he took for a star, but when he turned to look at it there was something wrong about this particular star. It, whatever "it" was, was moving. It was moving toward him.

He instinctively shut his eyes, if for no other reason than shut out this impossible world, then it hit him. He had to be asleep. He had never left his hotel room, and was dreaming all this nonsense.

He opened his eyes, willed himself to wake, but now the star was very close, and the air was preternaturally still and inky black.

He blinked. And again, trying to clear his eyes and his mind. "Wake up!" he shouted.

The star settled in the ink above his head, and the painting in the window shimmered in the intense light, then the organist from the cathedral stood beside him, and he too was looking intently at the painting in the window.

"Interesting, don't you think?" he said - out of the blue.

"What?" The man turned and looked at the organist; the musician was dressed in knickers and a long coat, and his hair was, what? A wig? A powdered wig?

"It's an interesting painting, don't you think. Do you remember?"

"What?"

"Do you remember?"

"Remember? Remember what?"

"Look at it, would you?"

He looked. Again, and for the first time. A boat, a sailboat, lay at anchor in a picturesque harbor. A small harbor, a Mediterranean harbor, perhaps. The boat's name, just legible: Springer. There was a man standing on the back of the boat, looking down into the water. Looking down at - a dolphin?

"So? Do you remember?"

He stared at the scene for a while, but nothing came to mind. "No. Why should I?"

"Ah. So..."

He turned and looked at the organist, saw two scars under the man's right eye, but then the organist's form shimmered in the air, and began to fade...

"Who are you? What's your name?"

"You can call me... Johann, if that suits you," the wavering shape said as it disappeared into the blackness. He saw the faint contours of a smile hanging in the air apparent, and then all was black, even the painting in the gallery window was gone, and he felt himself falling, falling...

He was conscious of the bed, that he was in bed, aware of sweat forming on his neck and running down his back, then he saw that his jacket was draped over the chair by the window, and his shoes and slacks lay in a discarded heap on the floor by the bathroom.

"Shit, that was the worst fucking nightmare I've ever had in my life," he said as he got up from the bed. He shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and then he saw the last remnants of snow melting inside the cuffs of his pants.

+++++

The Massachusetts Bay Colony, New England

Yesterday

The girl walked along the shoreline collecting driftwood to use for firewood, though she stopped to pick up seashells or the odd, brightly colored stone she came upon from time to time, and while not quite bored this was a chore she handled several times a week. Her's was an important task, too, for her brothers rarely had time to spend gathering wood after a long day working the fields, or worse still, hunting in the woods west of the colony. There were bears about now that autumn had arrived, and there had been reports of wolves taking livestock near Bradford's Plymouth Plantation.

Of even greater concern? The local "Indians". For what had once been a strained, if somewhat cordial coexistence had after a few years fractured as colonists - like her brothers - encroached on the native's territory and openly, if not quite brazenly, taken game from their land. Though open hostilities were rare, colonists had spent most of the summer reinforcing the colony's outer fortifications, and a few of the "Indians" she had run across on her waterfront gatherings had treated her with a cool contempt. Still, despite the language barrier, she had made more than a few friends in several of their nearby villages.

Yet even so, she counted "Indians" - along with the dangerous indigenous wildlife one could happen upon at any time - among the things she kept a wary eye out for. Her brothers had taught her well to trust little in this dangerous New World, and it was a lesson she had grown to appreciate from the experiences of other colonists. That, and she did not consider herself a fool.

From time to time whales visited the inner bay, and on hearing the unmistakable sound of a whale broaching and clearing water from it's blow-hole, she looked up from her chores and turned to see what she guessed was a mother and calf swimming along the shoreline. The girl stood transfixed, for she had never seen a pair so close to the beach before; indeed, she felt a mad, impulsive desire to dash out into the water and swim out to touch them.

As if reading her mind, the mother turned away from the beach and disappeared beneath the surface; her calf dutifully turned and followed, and the girl wistfully looked after them for a while before turning her attention back to gathering wood.

It was then that she heard a rustling in the tall grass that lined the beach, and she froze and looked intently for the source of the sound. Turning her head just so, she picked up the noise again, only the noise was a lot closer than she'd previously guessed. Now she wondered how long it would be before this phantasm revealed itself.

She did not have long to wait.

Not too very far away, a smooth, bronze haired catamount walked out of the grass and onto the beach, turning it's head first away from the girl, then directly at her.

The big cat froze in it's tracks, then lowered it's head a bit as it stared at the girl.

The girl knew the outermost ramparts of the colony were almost a mile away, certainly too far to run back to, and as suddenly she knew her life was over. It was as if all decisions concerning the time and place of her death had just been made for her, and now there was nothing left to do but calmly wait for the end.

The cat turned and began walking slowly towards her.

And it was then that she noticed an arrow sticking out of the cat's rear side, and that the cat was quite ill. It walked almost as if it was taken with too much drink: it wobbled, she now saw, almost unsteadily toward her, and as the cat drew near she sensed that the animal was in a deeply fevered pain.

She knelt on the beach and held out her hands as if to show the animal she posed no threat, but as the cat drew near it simply collapsed onto the wet sand in front of her. She leaned over and stroked the cat's head, then felt it's nose. Hot and dry, so hot in fact that it almost felt as if it was on fire. Then she looked at the arrow.

It had penetrated the cat's rear leg on the right side and gone all the way through, leaving the arrowhead to repeatedly slash into the inside of the cat's left leg. Both wounds were maggot-ridden and filthy and, she assumed from the look of them, very badly infected. The only thing she could think to do was to wash the cat's wounds, and then maybe try to get the arrow out. She stood and turned toward water, then stumbled backwards in shock.

The whale - the mother, she assumed - had returned and was now impossibly close to the beach, but it was the whale's small, brown eye that gripped her heart. Their was a penetrating directness in the animal's gaze that disoriented the girl, and for a moment she feared that she was in some obscure way being judged. She could make out huge, deep scars on the whale's side, and wondered for a moment if it, too, had been hurt in some way.

Without really thinking, she then walked slowly to the water's edge and cupped water in her hands, then walked back to the cat and rinsed it's oozing wounds. She returned to the water again and again until she was satisfied the dirt and pus were gone and the wounds were running clear, then she turned to the shaft of the arrow.

When she touched the shaft of the arrow the cat flinched, opened it's eyes and looked at her, but the animal seemed too weak to do more than lift it's head. Without hesitating, she broke the shaft above the wound and pulled it through the leg, and a fresh torrent of blood and pus ran from the freshly opened sores out onto the sand. The girl dashed back to the sea and ferried more water to rinse the wounds, then she removed a kerchief from around her neck and tied it around the cat's leg, staunching the renewed flow.

Only then did she turn to look back at the whale, but it was...gone. There was no sign of it at all, either close to the beach or further away, out to sea, and she found herself wondering if she had ever really seen it. Perhaps, she thought, it had all been a dream.

Then as suddenly she heard music, and turning back to the cat she found herself almost face to face with the beast. It was standing now, and eyeing her menacingly, but then it turned and sniffed the kerchief around it's leg, then the girl's hair. The cat circled her once, and again, rubbing up against her roughly as it paced, then it walked off slowly into the grass, stopping only once to look back at the girl.

Again, she felt as though she were being judged, and the feeling unnerved her...but then there was the music. It was strange, whatever it was, totally unfamiliar in form, but whatever else it may have been, what she heard now was certainly music...but out here? Where? On the shore? Or coming from the grass?

Then she was certain of it. The music was coming from deep within the grassy field adjacent to the shoreline, and it appeared as if the cat was walking directly toward whoever was out there.

She had to warn whomever it was, so she took off through the grass, and took note that she was following the big cat's trail.

The cat's prints came to an abrupt end, and there she found a man sitting on a blanket. He was sitting cross-legged on the blanket but even so appeared gaunt, almost emaciated, yet the most conspicuous thing about the man was the small round spectacles he was wearing, for they were tinted a very deep blue, and she had never in her life seen anything even remotely like them. And his hair! It was straight and so very long, but she couldn't recall ever seeing a man with hair so long.

The man was playing a stringed instrument he cradled gently in his lap, and singing about pools of sorrow and waves of joy and images of broken light and none of it made any sense to her...but suddenly - like a bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky - everything the man sang made perfect sense. And with this realization came the feeling, startlingly clear in it's intensity, that she had seen and heard it all before...the whale...the cat...and this man singing about something called the universe, and then everything was spinning in shimmering air.

Thoroughly disoriented, she sat down not far from the man and listened to his music, yet he never once looked up at her. He seemed, in fact, oblivious to his surroundings, almost as if he wasn't really there beside her. Then he stopped playing and looked up at the sky, then down again until he was looking directly at her.

"Is that your cat?" he asked.

"What?"

"The cat. Is that your bloomin' cat?"

She turned, saw the catamount sitting on the ground behind her, contentedly licking a paw while it looked at the man.

"Uh, no. I thought it must be yours..."

"That's a fookin' big cat."

"It's hurt."

"It doesn't look fookin' hurt, Eleanor Rigby. It looks bleedin' hungry..."

"Eleanor? My name's not..."

"Oh, I know, girlie. Just an expression." He looked around the grass, looked perplexed as if these were not his expected surroundings. "Where am...where is this?"

"You don't know?"

"I'm pretty sure I wouldn't ask if I knew, ya know?"

"Did you walk up from Plymouth?"

"Plymouth?" he intoned - as if not sure what she was talking about. "No, I don't think so..."

"Oh? Where did you come from?"

The man looked around these strawberry fields again, then at the huge cat, then down at his hands and the instrument in his lap. "I'm not...I can't remember..."

"Well, this is the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Plymouth is down that way," she said, pointing roughly to the southeast. "Didn't you come from there? Are you lost?"

"Lost?" Again, the dead tone in his voice defined the moment, then he looked down at the musical instrument in his lap and began playing again.

"Nothin's gonna change my world, girlie," he sang, but in the same flat affect, and with that he abruptly stopped. "You been to the carnival yet?"

"The what?"

"The carnival. You must be from the carnival."

"I'm not sure what that is," she said. "Where is it?"

He looked around the field again, only now looking very confused, confused - almost to the point of tears.

"What the fook!" he screamed suddenly - as he recoiled from an unseen blow. It was as if he'd seen something awful, or that something quite unexpected had just happened to him.

"What is it?" she cried out, but the man's form began to shimmer in the afternoon light, turning first a bright silver, then brighter and brighter. She saw blood erupting on the man's shirt, a very confused look on his face, then stark fear in his eyes as his form turned into pure light.

She turned away, shielded her eyes as she tried to look at him, but then he was gone.

She opened her eyes and the cat was there, yawning, and looking at her. It rolled over on the grass and presented it's belly to her, and without thinking she began rubbing the huge cat's fur. Then she noticed all the wounds she had cleansed were gone, and she looked at the animal's eyes again.

She felt something kind, something almost compassionate about the animal's eyes now, and once again, that same sudden feeling of familiarity. Shaking her head, she stood and the cat stood too, then it leaned into her as it sniffed her clothing, then her hair.

She heard someone calling her name. A familiar voice. She turned toward the ramparts and saw her brother running her way, and several more colonists following behind him.

She looked at the cat, saw it looking at the people running their way, then she saw it look up into her eyes once again before it settled into a slow trot and ambled off into the grass. Her brother arrived seconds later.

"Was that a lion?" he was pointing off into the grass as he spoke, but he struggled to catch his breath.

"A lion? Are you serious? Good Lord, no!"

He leaned over, struggling to breathe. "What the devil is that!" he gasped out, pointing at the grass behind her.

She turned, looked at the ground, saw a spreading stain of blood there - then she jumped backwards, slamming into her brother and almost knocking him down. "I don't know," she said, her voice now dripping with uncertainty. "I - don't - know."

Her brother stood upright and looked around the field. "I know I saw a catamount," he said, still breathing hard. "It must have killed a deer - here. Maybe you came along - and scared it. Dragged it away - into the woods. We'd better - get out of here."

The other colonists had gathered round now, and they saw the blood, heard her brother talking about having seen a big cat. That was enough for them. "Let's get out of here," one of them said, and there was a general assent to that proposition.

She turned to look for the cat again, but there was no sign of it at all, so she turned and looked out to sea. Nothing. Nothing anywhere.

"I've got to fetch my wood," she said.

"Alright then. Let's go."

It was a long walk back to the colony, and a very cold wind fell in from the north woods. She heard the man's music, heard it in her mind's eye.

What had changed his world, she wondered?

+++++

(A note in passing: There are times when I've been at sea, usually late at night and while "on watch", that I struggle to stay awake; in conversations with other sailors I've found this to be an ever-present and often hard fought battle. I've also found that, more often than not, one of the most enjoyable ways for me to stave off falling asleep is to think up storylines, and many of the the stories I've posted here on Literotica have sprung to life under these conditions. 'Driftwood' came to be on a short passage from Annapolis, Maryland to Penobscot Bay, Maine a few years ago, and it was on this trip that the bare outlines for a forthcoming story titled 'An Evening at the Carnival with Mister Christian' came to be. To those of you who've read Tom Goodwin's and Margherita Morretti's song in my 'Passegiatta' series (released here on Literotica in 2008), the "metaphysical contours" of 'Driftwood' may seem (hopefully!) familiar, but don't jump to too many conclusions just yet. If you haven't waded through Passegiatta, and all the way to the bitter end, you might want to consider doing so in the next few months (and this assumes 'Driftwood' piqued your interest). I say this as 'Driftwood', and to an even greater extent 'An Evening at the Carnival with Mister Christian' are indirect outgrowths of that story. And I've used the term 'song' advisedly as well, for the way I develop many of these seaborne stories is to take my sodden, discombobulated ramblings, and then sit down at a keyboard, a portable piano keyboard of the 25 key ilk, and there these tales take shape, but first musically, as it were. Then comes the fun part. "Writing" - by trying to combine my memories of these ramblings with the emotive language of music, but into words. 'An Evening at the Carnival with Mister Christian' has bounced from such errant mid-watch musings to music to scribbled passages over many years, and it's still not where I want it, but it's getting close. Hopefully you'll find it posted here soon, but on another note I wanted to pass along that the earlier and hideously convoluted three part series entitled 'The Starlight Sonata' still remains unfinished, but I like where it's headed. Assuming I don't get hit by lightning or somehow shuffle off this mortal coil in the interim, expect to see a final 'one part' rendering of 'Starlight' sometime in the next year or so. I think a lot of loose ends will be tied together with this piece, and hopefully in an interesting way. Anyway, to those here on Lit who like to share comments at the end of these stories, please know that they're appreciated very much, and that for me they have helped make the journey worthwhile. "AL":12/25/2014)