Life Forms

Masterson scowled, ‘You see, what did I tell you?  The man’s head is warped from all that time spent on his tod lapping up the rubbish in those books.’

‘Well, Father,’ Stinson said.  ‘I’d go with the Captain’s knowledge on this one.  No matter how eccentric he may seem, or however mad the notion, this is his world, remember.’

Having returned to his duties at the helm, Fergal imagined his ecclesiastical shipmates were now thoroughly questioning his sanity, and perhaps even developing a view towards undermining his stewardship.  (And how correct he was.)  But let them, he thought.  They were here now so they would surely see for themselves what the savage pond had in store for them – if indeed they chose not to heed the warning he’d given them. 

Fergal hadn’t seen any monsters himself; he’d hooked and netted some bizarre-looking lunkers in his time, but no monsters.  Still, all his life he’d heard the stories.  He knew for example of the Giant Fluffy Piranha (not the formal nomenclature) from Peter Malin, a Sligo man, who was chief engineer on a merchant ship in the 1910s and who retired to Killybegs in ‘46 with his wife Nuala.  Malin spoke of the ship being attacked during an Atlantic crossing by what he specifically described as ‘some oversized flocculent fishes with teeth’ that came shooting out of the water and snapping at the crew’s bottom halves.  Much blood was spilled, but none died on that occasion; though tales existed of other ships and crews that had not been so lucky.  Petrifying, Peter Malin said, recalling the incident. 

For proletarians of the sea, the most enduring legend was that of the Great Mysticete, also known as the Boro Whale.  Those in charge – the captains, commanders, mates and swains – tended to play down stories of its existence; it was critical for them to discourage hysteria on their vessels and possibly they were also reluctant to admit such a monster could live and breathe in the deep.  The Boro Whale was said to have been the largest creature that ever lived on the earth.  In fact, its size was unfathomable, and swelled bigger with every account of it.  The whale was so large that it had swallowed entire populations over its 500 years in the sea.  Those it consumed continued their lives within its tremendous gut, and even had space in there to build new towns and cities, set up fresh civil societies.  For some centuries, a whole new country survived within the Boro Whale’s belly until one day the urban pollution got so severe it caused the great mysticete to implode in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.  (In popular belief, this implosion created a fissure in the sea floor, a gap into hell, and from this came a host of new parasitic life forms to terrorise the oceans.)      

Those organisms known to convene during foggy weather, and the reason Fergal had advised caution, were called Socket-Owners.  He’d heard scores of old sea dogs going on about them.  Many a mariner over the years had woken of a night in an awful sweat, and run to the nearest mirror to check if his eyeballs were still there.  Socket-Owners were described as having an appearance not unlike that of jellyfish – delicate like them; translucent like them; but smaller.  Socket-Owners were born into darkness.  They materialised in misty seas and took fishermen by surprise, springing from the water, and going right for the eyes.  Once they squeezed their way into your head via the socket, crushing your eyeballs in the process, they proceeded to establish settlement in the hollow, altering their form in such a way as to become something akin to human eyeballs.  But a grotesque adaptation it was.  Each eyeball became a huge white protuberance with a flushed green pupil in the centre.  In some rare cases, the victims survived, but never looked human again, and lived like outcasts.           

Oh, there were many stories.  And many more.

Even his own father used to talk about a cursed red dolphin usually spotted by sailors just before their boat was to sink for no apparent reason.  What steps the sailors took upon first sight of the dolphin to prevent themselves from sinking didn’t matter a speck, the dreaded mammal always saw its malediction through, and the boats would always go down eventually.  The only hope you had was if there was room for you on the life raft.  Luckily, there was room for a young Mr. Littlewood on the occasion that his crew encountered the cursed red dolphin; and Fergal got to be born.   

Though he had not seen any of these things for himself, he believed the stories.  In the long evolutionary passage, many colourful turns had been taken, so why wouldn’t such things exist?  He had faith in the mindset of his culture and at least some experience of aberrant phenomena in the world to not brush it all off conservatively.  Also, Fergal believed, as his dear mother had, that science itself was a miracle of God’s creation.  That the world as God had it was no promised land; it was rife with deceit too.  Science provided calibration.  God understood quite sensibly that some discipline made the lies more believable.