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In The Mind’s Eye

Richard Lind

    Deep Blue Ocean waters lapped against the bow of the tiny wooden lifeboat.

    Inside lay, a large blond man dressed in a dirty white shirt and tattered black pants, sleeping. A particularly large wave struck hard against his safe haven causing him to waken. He did so with an audible groan.
    Christopher Grissom sat up slowly wiping the gum from his eyes. He glanced up squinting at the giant cycloptic eye staring down at him, unrelenting, as it had for the five previous days.
    His water had given out three days before and he knew what that meant. He just preferred not to think about death, if that were possible.
    For lack of much else, left to do Grissom turned his mind back to the sinking of the Sandobar. It had been a nightmare. He could still hear the screams of the dying. They haunted him not just when he slept but in his waking world as well.
    The fire had been quick and harsh sparing none of the twenty-crew members, save Grissom, who had somehow fallen into the ship’s lone lifeboat. They had been taking cargo from England to South Carolina. This was to be his last voyage. Now, he lay in the tiny bit of humanity floating in the Atlantic. He felt like a fly in a coup bowl.
    He thought of his good fortune turned bad. Yes, he had survived, but now he would die a slow painful death.
    Grissom smiled making his swollen, chapped lips crack. He could taste blood in his mouth. He spat once.
    Gulls flew overhead calling to him waiting. He rose with the final fury of a man dying on the battlefield wanting so desperately to live.
    “Get away! Damn you! Get away! I’ll not die like some damned fish. Do you hear me you bastards!” The gulls flew higher.
    “Get away! I swear to God that you will not have my carcass! You will not have my-” he cried and fell back down in the boat his voice trailing off in a small choke. Grissom felt sick and forced his head over the side of the boat. Grissom wretched four times, nothing but foul smelling yellow bile exited from his insides.
    It was then that he saw the sail of the large ship. It was coming for him.
    “Thank God-” he whispered his greasy hair hanging in his face.
    He put out his hand, getting ready to wave and then quickly recoiled in horror. “Lord no,” he said his eyes getting wide.
    He could almost see the tattered remains of the main sail ad the rotted wood on the bow. Every man who sailed had heard of it. It was the Styx come to take him away.
    The ship had been sailing the oceans searching for sailors about to die. She would take them as crew torturing them until Judgment Day when the craft would lurch down into ocean and sail to the depths of hell. The Styx was an unholy terror that made all men cringe.
    He could see the small dots pointing at him from the fore deck. He screamed and then forced himself to remain calm. It was his only chance.
    The ship came for him like a cat to its prey. 100 yards away and closing the ship lowered a long boat.
    Grissom waited in his own smaller craft, a hapless victim. He whimpered once before setting himself straight. He could see inside the boat as it came aft of him. Six small heads stared at him; worms crawled around in their eye sockets. They stared back with cold pitiless faces. Sailors damned for eternity.
    The long boat was not on the port side. Hands rotted and fetid with decay reached out and grasped the side of Grissom’s vessel. The smell of their decay threatened to overwhelm him. He saw odious flesh fall from a hand with a sickening plop.
    Grissom screamed with stark white terror and crawled back as far toward the bow as possible.
    Two sailors, damned, climbed into Grissom’s craft.
    Grissom snarled at them with the sound of a feral animal.
    “Weee’rrrreee hhheeerrreee tooo heeelp yooouuu,” one said through a mouth of scum and filth.
    “Get back! I am a Christian man!” Grissom bellowed.
    “Yeeesss,” the other said.
    The second dead sailor backed away as Grissom drew a wicked dagger from his belt.
    It perplexed Grissom for a moment. Then, he realized with mounting joy that his knife was blessed somehow! “God be with me!” He shouted.
    Like a lion, he leapt forward grabbing the nearest dead man and driving his dagger through its rotted chest. He screamed in rage and hurled the dead man at the long boat that now backed away. The other dead man pushed the carcass of his mate away and swam for the long boat.
    Grissom screamed in triumph as the Styx hauled the long boat up and the ship sailed past.
    He howled and thrust his fist up in the air feeling his glory. Grissom began to paddle away...
    ...The sailors climbed back aboard the whaling vessel in shock.
    “Wot the hell happened?” Bellowed Captain Manhue.
    “Don’t know sir. He’s touched in the head. Killed Jones and we backed away. Should we go back for him?” One shaken sailor said licking his lips nervously.
    “Naw, hangin’ too good for that sot. Helmsman hard ta port.”

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