Thom Shift

There were five men in the water.  Before anyone could give a name to the sound we were hearing there were five men stumbling stupidly toward the starboard side, knocking their hips against the railings and tumbling, heels over head, into the sea.   “Man overboard!” went the call and it repeated with every third man that heard it.  “Man overboard!” Called Mr. Swanson, a grizzled old gentleman with a body filled with bright tattoos over leathered skin.  “Man Overboard!” called Riptide Jack, who had always threatened to throw a man or two in himself whenever a dice-game wasn’t going in his favour.  “Man overboard!” called Mr. Kawai, who was the first to toss buoy and rope with one good hand and one dull, blunted curved hook.  By the time the crew had assembled for a proper rescue, several great fanned tails were seen lashing at the surface of the water and it appeared as if three of the men were already being dragged underneath.  A fourth man, a brute and a brigand known as Jonas Black, was seen floating on his back, though no one was sure whether the sounds he was making were sobs or bouts of laughter.  

There were creatures all around him.  Four of them swam with him, lashing at the water with their tails every so often.  Their bodies resembled women.  No, they more resembled girls; young girls with budding breasts, wild, short hair and grotesque shell-shaped ears.  They caressed his sun-beaten skin with strange webbed hands.  In a moment they flashed eyes black as coal up at the crew, then turned back to Jonas, smiling at him and revealing tiny, pointed teeth before biting into the flesh of his chest, his belly, and his legs.  

            “Mermaids” someone in the crowd muttered in wonder.  

            “Worse” another man cried out.  “Sirens!”  He plugged his ears and a wave of panic ran through the crowd of us as we realized it was the sirens’ song that had made them do it.  It was the sirens’ song that we’d heard before, and were still hearing now.

            “Keep your wits about you!” barked Mr. Swanson, and he threw another of the buoys and managed to chase off one of the creatures gnawing at Jonas’s leg. 

            “Don’t save me, gents.” He’d managed to say just as he pulled up the one free leg and kicked away the buoy meant to save his life, or at least give him hope.  “Oh, God.  Oh, heaven.  Oh, hell that awaits me!  If you could feel what I’m feeling you’d beg for the same.  Don’t you dare try to save me!”

Later, at the wake we would have in his honour, the men would remember that the only time Jonas had responded to anything with more than a miserable grunt had been that very moment.

Thom Shift was the fifth man in the water and he clung to the buoy meant for Jonas as though he meant to tear the thing apart.  He’d escaped somehow.  Perhaps the sudden splash of warm brine had shocked him back into his senses.  Perhaps too much time working the cannons had made him deaf to the last faded notes of the sirens’ song.  Whatever way he’d managed it, he came up kicking and thrashing his way to the surface just as Jonas disappeared from sight in a stream of bubbles that broke the water where he’d last been seen, weighed down and delighted.  Still in shock, we’d all watched those bubbles.  Perhaps some of us were imagining old Jonas, cold hearted Jonas, stoic, stone-faced Jonas laughing all the way down.  Thom Shift, on the other hand, was screaming!

It took ten of us to pull him aboard and when we finally had him he was still babbling.  He’d start out in fright at every touch, screaming and swatting at phantoms. 

            “Swallowed too much salt water” suggested Riptide Jim with a knowing sort of nod.  “That and I suppose having the sea-hag’s voice in his mind...poor bastard’s gone insane.”  The men all nodded and murmured their approval at Jim’s wise assessment.  Swanson’s was the only dissenting voice.

            “No, you fools.”  He groaned.  “Look.  Look at his flesh.”  It was then that we saw them.  In the spots where his skin had been exposed, and in some spots where his clothes had been torn away, were bite marks.  They were all bright red and in the shape of two semicircles on top, and two on the bottom; one for each row of mermaid teeth.  Peculiarly, they did not bleed.  And while the flesh was pierced, it was not torn or gnawed at.

            “Poison.”  Swanson suggested.  “The beasties have poison in their bites.”   There began a debate among the crew on whether it was better to nurse a possibly mad sailor back to health or cast a poisoned man back into the sea.  The only thing that could break us out of our shock in that moment was the captain’s voice, and it came in a furious bellow.  The captain, a great barrel-chested, long-bearded beast of a man, had appeared on deck without us even noticing and was already tearing through the crowd of us, shoving men aside. 

            “All you men get back to work!” cried.  “Unless you’d rather join those we’ve lost today on the ocean floor!  We’ve got the Spanish at our tails and have to clear these damn monster-infested waters.  Back to work!  Back to work!  We set sail for Port Royale!  Get us clear of these beasts or it’s the lash for you!  Get back to work!”

And so we did.  And for some time Thom Shift was forgotten by his shipmates as we again made ready the sails to give us best speed in the wind.

That night we all mourned with grog and song.  The men who we had lost that day had been bunkmates with us.  Faces we had known nearly as well as our own.  We found their names in their absence.  Glenn Paddock, Jim Tillet, and Isaac Fletcher had been the first three dragged in.  We prayed that their deaths were as happy as Jonas Black’s had been.  I spent half the night still awake, for on the bunk above mine Thom Shift laid still as a corpse.  I eased out of my bed to peak at him, to check if he’d succumbed to the poison.  But as I eased my head out to peak at him I saw his eyes, wide open, staring back at me.  Even as I left the quarters I saw his eyes following me, filled with fright and anger.  I went out to find Swanson on deck that night and told him about Thom’s peculiar state.

            “That’d be the poison working its way into him.” Swanson said.  “First it kills the sleep, and then it’ll kill his taste for food, then his taste for everything else.  The only thing on his mind will be the beasts that bit into him.  The thought of them will drive him mad and take him away from this world.  The man won’t be a man again soon.  He’ll be something changed.  We’ll lose him eventually.”

            “Why doesn’t the captain make port and find him a doctor?” I asked.

            “No friendly ports around these parts.  Throw yourself roughly into the waves long enough, lad, and you lose many a friend.  Our captain’s been at this long enough the make quite a few enemies.  Only safe port is Port Royale, and that’s at least a four day journey.”

            “Do you think those things will be back?”

            “I’m sure of it.  We’ve got their prize now.  They don’t give up that easy.”

            “But the siren song didn’t affect us.  Only those few went in.”

           “Yes, that one handful for that one song, but that’s not the only song they know.  What you saw in the water  were juveniles.  The elder, the hag, hunts in a different way.  She has her tricks about her.  She knows just which songs to sing.  Be brave and you should be fine.” 

I could bare it no more.  I had to ask him how it was he knew so much about these creatures.  That’s when he opened his pea coat and pointed to his painted skin.  “Here is the adult mermaid”, Swanson said and pointed to one section where the fanned tail I’d seen earlier snaked around a ships anchor, and on the other end of the tail was a woman, but with hair far more luxurious and breasts much larger than the ones I’d seen that day.  “She is crafty, swift and dangerous.  All that only adds to her beauty, which is a blessing, since seeing her may be the last thing some men ever do. 

In another section was the face of a woman, reasonably done, which Swanson pointed to, saying “Here is my wife Maria, now dead.”  And in between the two sections of his stomach, he pointed out the barely visible double arcs and said “And here is the mark of the only time I have thought of taking another lover.  A time when the sea-hag’s song shook the sense out my head, and the kiss of a mermaid nearly took me to her ocean bed.  I escaped.  I went mad.  But with the help of my crew I found myself again.  But I promise you this, boy.  In four days, when we find ourselves in Port Royale, I’ll never sail the seas again.”

The next day we all worked diligently, though I’d never heard the crew so quiet.  Each man had their eyes on the water.  Each man was listening for a hint of song.  Each man watched Thom Shift report to mess, take a bowl of gruel, and weep bitterly into it. 

            “You see this hook?”  Mr Kawai said to him after placing a cup of grog in front of Thom.  “There used to be a hand where this hook is now‘till a recoiling canon tore the damn thing to shreds.  Dr. in Tortuga said there was no way of savin’ it, and it had already started to rot.   He had to saw through the bone.  And he had no anaesthetic.   Do you think I cried in my gruel after I got this hook?  Well I didn’t.  I know pain, sir.  It’s a good way of knowing you’re still alive.  And you haven’t even lost any limbs, so buck up, damnit!”

Thom Shift did not ‘buck up’.  That night, just as I was drifting off to sleep despite the sound of sobbing coming from the bunk above mine, I heard him stir.  I watched him make his way for the cabin door, letting in the moonlight...and the siren song.  I raised the alarm, though I barely had to.  The men had all been too afraid to sleep, their minds too busy anticipating this exact moment.  In the end, three men were holding down Thom Shift, who screamed and begged to be let go.  Four more men plummeted into the sea.  We did not look to see which of them had been dragged down immediately and which were being consumed. 

At noon the next day, after we’d adjusted our course and trimmed the sails, and after we’d fixed new bars to the cabin doors so that they would be locked from the outside, the Captain himself officiated the ceremony in honour of the men we had lost the night before.  Of special mention was Riptide Jack who, much of the crew agreed, was never quite as tough as he led on.  It was no wonder the siren song had gotten to him.  It was no surprise that he should surrender himself so eagerly that night.  Meanwhile Thom Shift had stopped his sobbing.  Now he only stared out at the world silently with a despondent look on his face.

That night they had come again, and again it was Thom who heard it first in the hold.  Some of the men had counted themselves lucky that the captain had ordered they be locked in.  That is, at least, until Thom brought out the knife.  The sound of the fracas inside along with the voices begging to be let out must have swayed old Swanson at the door.  At the end of that night, four other men joined the mermaids in their beds, including Mr. Kawai who, with a knife in his back, dragged a bloody trail across the deck and tossed himself over the railings.  Thom Shift had been struck over the head before he could get that far.

The next day the sun rose.  The men ate and worked, and they whispered amongst themselves.  One more night was all it would take.  They simply had to survive one more night and they would be in Port Royale, on land, and safe.   They whispered about killing Thom Shift.  They whispered about seizing him now from the hold where he called out the rest of the crew, torturing them with contrived love poems dedicated to his aquatic beauties, and tossing him into the water so that the mermaids would claim him, and possibly leave them alone.  The whispers got back to the captain.  A man received ten lashes for conspiring to murder a fellow crewman, and the whispers stopped. 

That night, no one slept.  We listened to the sound of the ocean against the hull, to the creaking of the masts as the winds urged them on.  That night we waited for the call we knew was coming.  We had expected the worst to come then, on our one last night.  The next day we would be in Port Royale, but this was something most only half expected.  The other half was the expectation of something horrible.  Thom Shift would find an errant keg of powder, or would claw his way through the hull and sink us all, or find some other way to put us all in danger.  But that night nothing happened.  All was quiet.  All was still.

The next day the sun came up and set us all to work.  Today would be the day: the day we made landfall.  We ate, we sang, we made full advantage of the wind.  The Captain stood on the aft deck, nodding approvingly and stroking his massive beard.  Just before mid-day a call came from the crow’s nest: “Land Ho!”  The crew rejoiced!  We had made it!  We had survived the night and would arrive in Port Royale within hours.  Over the reverie, I could hear a voice calling out, shouting over and over again. 

            “Captain!  Captain!  The rock!  Look there, on the rock!  Captain!”

A hush fell over the crowd, and then shouts of anger as a few of the men produced their spyglasses and focused on a jagged rock less than a mile away that jutted out of the sea.

The creature that sat upon that rock was at once frightening and arresting.  What must have been a full century in the sea had turned her hair a pale green.  Her bare breasts settled lower than the illustration in Mr. Swanson’s tattoos.  She did not look especially inhuman.  In fact, except for the massive tail which wrapped around the rock she had perched on, she looked exactly like some of the women that so many of the men had been longing to visit in Port Royale.  That, I would argue, might have been the most terrifying thing about her.

That is to say, I would argue that point had I not witnessed what happened next.  Just before the spyglass was snatched from my hands I saw the creature breathe deep, filling her chest with air.  The next thing I heard was the groaning of men.  All the men, all at once, fell to their hands and knees.  Some began immediately to weep, suddenly aware of the loss of every great love in their lives, and confessing it all aloud.  A horrible pain filled my chest just then, a pain which I couldn’t understand then, and can barely describe now.  It was, if I am forced to equate it to anything, the feeling of utter loneliness.  I listened to the entire crew weeping, even the captain, and I felt so much like dying from the fact that I could not cry with them. 

Somehow, though, I knew what I could do.  Without thinking much about it I found myself opening the cargo hold and lowering a rope for Thom Shift.  If I could not weep, if I could not feel the satisfaction of knowing that loss, then I could at least set him free.  He thanked me, and made a straight line toward the creature on the rock a mile away, as if he meant to walk the entire distance into her arms.  He didn’t even step over the railing.  Just as he had done before, he ignored everything that was real and stumbled quite stupidly into the water.

At least, Mr. Swanson was a bit more graceful than that.  He stood at the edge of the railing staring toward the siren on the rock and sobbed quietly.  I called out his name and he turned to me, eyes pouring tears, and said “I hear her.  I hear my Maria.  I think she wants me with her.  I think I want to go.”  He perched himself on the edge of the railing, removed his pea coat, and dove in headfirst.