Charlie and the Ship III (Day 6)

Continued from Day 5.

* * *

Charlie took the liberty to gape at the inside of the captain's quarters.

The walls and ceiling were covered in intricately carved, lacquered wood. There were different varieties, and they all looked expensive, although Charlie only recognized mahogany. Illumination was provided by brass wall lanterns, emerging from the woodwork.

A heavy desk sat in the middle of the room, with a chair behind it. On the desk there were candles, an old-looking globe, an inkwell and some gold-tipped quills. (Charlie had wondered how all these items stayed in place if there was a storm, until he discovered that they were glued to the desk; except for the quills, which were held in place by a stand which was glued to the desk.) Any free space on the walls was covered in bookcases, stretching all the way from the floor to the ceiling, so that in order to reach the books on the highest shelves Charlie had to climb onto the stool that was there for the purpose. The captain's bed - which was colossal - occupied a space in the stern end of the cabin, and was currently unmade, as he supposed Melissa must have left it. The floor was strewn with carpets, laying across and on top of each other haphazardly, leaving the impression that if you lifted them up, you would find another layer underneath. All of them looked exotic and achingly expensive. The stretch between the door and the bed was stained; it would seem that the girl didn't have much respect for fine rugs.

In the low drawer under the bed Charlie had found a heap of maps. He'd spent a good hour studying them. There were numerous versions of familiar places like the Caribbean sea, Corsica and Sardinia, and the Indian Ocean, mingled with names he'd never even heard of before, such as the Silent Isles or the Bay of Folk. There were many instances of more detailed maps for shorelines, shallows and straits, all meticulously scribed by different captains in different times. In one corner of the room there were cardboard tubes with paintings inside, some of which had signatures that would have raised some highly esteemed eyebrows. There were also some cabinets under the windows, where the space didn't permit for a full-height bookcase, but they were locked, so Charlie didn't know what they held inside.

The maps and the paintings were entertaining, but it was the books that interested Charlie the most. By the looks of it, being dead left you with plenty of time to read, or at least to amass vast amounts of literature. It seemed like you could find anything that was ever written on those shelves. Behind cords preventing them from falling out were volumes of everything from leather-bound Homer and Dickens to paperback Stephen King. There were books in Arabic and Chinese, and in a handful of other, stranger languages. It seemed impossible for the Captain to have read even one tenth of them. Charlie had spent fifteen minutes or so just looking at the titles and gotten halfway through the first shelf of the first bookcase.

The Captain had said Charlie could sleep in the mate's quarters, but was free to peruse the contents of the captain's quarters whenever Melissa wasn't sleeping, assuming of course that the young lady had no objections. She didn't, so Charlie took full advantage of the offer. Presently, he was sitting at the Captain's desk, examining the globe. It had to be hundreds of years old, judging by both its appearance and the maps, which still showed the North American colonies as part of the British Empire. It was hand-painted in astonishing detail. The surface felt wooden, and it was flawless; only the stand had a little chip in it. He gave the thing an experimental spin. It moved smoothly, making nearly no noise at all.

The gilded handle on the door turned, and Melissa's head peeked in through the doorway.

"We're going up now. Wanna come watch?" she said.

"We're going where?" Charlie laid his fingers against the surface of the globe and it glided to a halt.

"Up. To the other sea."

"Which sea is that?"

"I don't know. The sea that's up. The one around the Old Continent. I don't think it's got a name."

Charlie looked at the globe. According to the Captain, they were currently in the Atlantic, somewhere between Africa and South America. He supposed 'up' meant north; in that case, it would be logical if the Old Continent referred to Europe. It would have been called the Old World in the Captain's time. But what was so special about that?

"I think I'll pass."

"Are you sure? It's really pretty."

"Uhm." On the other hand, it wasn't as if the globe was going anywhere. It was, after all, glued to the desk.

"Pleeease?" The girl held that 'e' for an obscene duration, and made the face little children make so well when they want to get their way. Puppy-dog eyes, lower lip stuck out at you.

"I -- ah, all right. I'm coming."

Melissa grinned and disappeared from the doorway. Charlie got up and followed.

If anything, the night had deepened. The ship was an island of light encased in black velvet, gliding through the waves. The boy Melissa had identified as Johnny - he looked somewhere in his early twenties, though in actuality the ages of all the crewmen could be measured in centuries - was sitting on a boom; Abraham was in the forecastle, leaning on the bowsprit; Cindy stood on the stern deck with the Captain, and the Captain was still at the helm.

In the yellow lantern-light, Charlie saw Melissa run to the mast and grab a rope ladder.

"Hold it," he said. She didn't hear him. She was climbing the ladder like a little monkey, despite each rung being more than knee-height compared to the first to her. "Hold it! Where are you going?"

The girl stopped and turned her head. "Crow's nest."

"You didn't say anything about going to the crow's nest! I can't come up there, I'll fall down!"

"Aww, but you promised!" She let go with one hand, hanging on with the other and letting herself dangle limply to the side of the ladder.

"Don't do that!" Charlie could barely watch. She had to be ten feet up by now, what if she broke her neck?

"Do what?"

"That! Otherwise you are going to fall!"

"Am not! And you isn't gonna fall neither! Come on!" Melissa swung herself back to the ladder. At first Charlie thought she was going to climb down, but instead she hooked her legs over one of the rungs, let go with her hands and hung there, upside-down. "Look, it's totally safe!"

"Stop it! You're going to break your neck!"

"Am not!"

"Stop that!"

"I'm not gonna stop unless you come up."

Charlie hesitated. Melissa looked at him for a moment. Then she began to swing back and forth on the ladder, pushing off of the mast with one foot for momentum.

"Okay, you win! I'm coming." Charlie walked to the ladder. The upside-down Melissa looked at her expectantly.

"No chance, young lady. You first."

She pulled herself up and back onto the ladder, but didn't start climbing until Charlie had set a foot on the bottom rung.

Charlie hadn't done any climbing whatsoever since he was five. He'd been on his great-grandfather's farm in Minnesota, climbed six feet into an oak and fallen out of it, spraining his ankle. He was quite sure the mast was higher than six feet. He clambered up unsteadily, rung after rung. The ladder was out of control; it bent when he moved and jittered when he stopped and generally refused to stay in place.

About halfway up, he looked down. This was not one of the wiser things to do.

In New York, Charlie had his cubicle on the nineteenth floor, right next to a window overlooking the metropolis. He saw it from that height several times a day, when he was coming to or going from work, when he was getting coffee, when he was going to use the photocopier. The ground did not look at all frightening from behind panes of thick glass. Swinging freely above the deck of a ship was another matter entirely. On a jittery rope ladder. In the middle of the night. Looking at the abyss of the ocean.

"Why'd you stop?" inquired Melissa from above. She'd been sitting in the crow's nest for ages.

"Just having a breather," he said.

Steady breaths. Charlie felt his pulse throb on the side of his neck. Lift one foot. Place it on the next rung. Pull yourself up. Good. Now repeat. Johnny was oblivious to the drama that was taking place above him, or perhaps disinterested. Abraham was absorbed with stuffing his pipe. Charlie looked back up. Rung after rung, he managed to get himself to the top of the mast.

"Don't step on Mister Roger when you come up, Mister Charlie." Melissa gestured at a black heap of cotton on the floor. Charlie opened it to reveal the skull-and-crossbones flag of a pirate ship. "Mister John says it's been more than a hundred years since he last flied Mister Roger. Oh, look, you're just in time. We're going up now." She lay her forearms flat on the railing of the crow's nest and rested her chin on her hands.

There was no lantern in the crow's nest. Charlie supposed the idea was to maximize the line of sight. The ones below gave enough illumination to make the surface of the ocean somehow visible as the crests of waves glinted in the lantern-light.

The first sign of something happening was the sound of the hull groaning silently. Then, gradually, the flickering of the waves started to grow more and more distant. There was no wind. There was no noise at all, except for the occasional creaking caused by the decreased pressure to the ship's sides as it rose out of the sea. When the ship broke contact with the ocean, at the edge of hearing there was the momentary sound of poured water -- leftover moisture was dripping off the keel and back into the sea. Charlie was getting goosebumps. There was something particularly eldritch about tons of ancient ship starting to levitate when it happened with such grace.

The ascent picked up speed when the ship had left the water. They were getting visibly closer to the cumulus clouds, hanging here and there, low in the sky. On the stern deck, Cindy had put her arms gently around the Captain, who was still steering, as if there was a precise route you were supposed to follow in order to be able to sail your ship to heaven. Maybe there was. Charlie wondered whether it, too, could be found on the Captain's maps.

They kept rising, on and on through the night. The waves were long out of sight. They were almost level with the clouds; and now, they sailed right into one them. It was like driving a car into thick fog without the lights on; you couldn't see a thing. The moisture condensed or Charlie's face and hands and in his clothes. He couldn't see the deck at all anymore. The lanterns appeared as stains of light in the uniform grayness of the cloud. Johnny, Abraham, Cindy and the Captain were all obscured by it.

For a long moment they were traveling inside the cloud. The condensed water was cold and Charlie was starting to regret leaving the jacket the Captain had lended to him on the mate's bed. Then, the mist above his head started thin. The mast, along with the crow's nest, was the first thing to surface. But it wasn't emerging from the cloud anymore.

It emerged from another sea. Charlie shuddered with excitement. This was miles better than Copperfield.

* * *

Continued from Day 5.

Finally, the weather was good enough for me to cycle to the park and sit under a tree writing. As you can see, it's been productive. I got the first draft done in a bit over two hours. Hand-written in a notebook, no less.

Tomorrow should be good for a park writing day, but Sunday should bring heavy rain. Which, on the other hand, might be just fine, too, provided that it doesn't rain into the little alcove of our balcony where I like to write. Oh, well, if it's going to be rough weather, I hope we get thunder again~