Castle of Water: A Novel(31)
Twilight came quickly and made way for the darkness. A profound darkness that left Barry grateful for the phosphorescent markings on the dial of his compass. Not even starlight could poke its way through the clouds. He was sitting atop his log, squinting at the compass face, and trying to orient himself back toward the south when he noticed it. But the sight of it didn’t register at first. It was just too improbable, entirely too surreal. He sat there, rocking to and fro on the steady roll of the waves, unable to make sense of what he saw in the distance.
No, that was impossible, he told himself. The very thing he had been begging for, pleading for, for almost a year, to suddenly appear like this? It had to be a trick—a ruse of the mind born of wishful thinking, or at the very least some effect from the new pair of contacts. Barry closed his eyes, felt the log buck ever so slightly beneath him on the cusp of a swell, and counted to ten. Then he blinked and opened them once again.
But they were still there. Three simple lights, like wandering magi, flickering on the horizon, seeking their star. Ships, freighters maybe, they could be nothing else. How far away, Barry had no way of knowing. Five miles? Ten miles? Twenty? It was impossible to say, although they certainly were a long ways off.
Stay calm. He had to, he reminded himself, which, when one is lost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, is far easier said than done. His heart was off to the races, and his hands were shaking to a beat all their own, but he had to keep his thoughts in order. This was no time for rash decisions or thoughtless impulses. A sudden urge to both laugh and cry and possibly scream ascended from his guts, but he fended it off with a deliberate swallow and unzipped the corner of the duffel bag instead. With an almost exquisite level of care, he pried the flare gun loose, inserted a single cartridge into its exaggerated barrel, and pointed it directly over his head. He executed a quick countdown—why, he could not say, but it felt like the right thing to do before a momentous event—and pulled the trigger. There was a hiss of sparks, a tense moment of silence, and then a brilliant pop. For a few precious seconds, the world glimmered red, before returning once again to inimitable darkness. “Please, please, please,” Barry begged aloud, “please, please, please.”
He waited five torturous minutes before firing again. Another brilliant, crimson moment, followed by a second wave of gut-wrenching dark. He was loading up to fire a third when something profound occurred to him. The radio. Was it possible? Was that where the background interference had been coming from? He uncovered the shortwave, being extra careful not to tip the log while the electronics were loose from the waterproof duffel bag. On the verge of hyperventilating, he turned the generator crank and gave the tuning dial a gentle whirl, wondering if his hunch might actually prove correct.
It did. Those same disembodied voices, ghostly as sin, were suddenly rising from the static in a cosmic symphony, only louder now and far more clear. Some were in Russian, others Chinese, and at least one in English. It was the maritime frequency band—it had to be. He’d been listening to transmissions from ships all along, broadcasting on shortwave frequencies when they were too far out at sea for their standard transmissions. He had heard them that first night when he was alone in the hammock, he had listened to them from the top of the mountain just before the storm, and now, in the middle of the ocean, he was picking up their signals from mere miles away. He was actually looking at them, for Pete’s sake, a cavalcade of improbable hope parading across a hopeless sea.
Barry fired all of their remaining flares into the inky heavens, allowing a few minutes between each burst for an agonizing wait and an anxious prayer. They were far off, he knew that, but maybe, just maybe … And in the seconds that followed, he envisioned the ships turning around, the lights growing brighter, his weakened body being hoisted up by a crew of compassionate arms from the all-swallowing sea.
But it was not to be. He had begun to turn the log northward again, in their general direction, preparing to meet them, when he noticed the first of the lights vanish from view. Then the second and, shortly after that, the third. One after the other, the ships were gobbled up by the horizon, leaving him alone and bobbing in the darkness once again, that brief flicker of hope snuffed out like a flame.
“No! No! No!” Barry was startled by the sound of his own shouts. He tore at his hair, gaping helplessly at the void where the ships had just been. An entire year he had waited for this, wailed for this, and then to watch them slip through his fingers like fireflies and twinkle away?
For the briefest and most desperate of moments, Barry considered going out after them. True, they had appeared to be moving away from him, at a speed far faster than he could ever hope to match, but there could be more out there. Perhaps it was a sea lane—after all, he had seen three separate ships glide across his purview. Wasn’t it possible that additional ships might be on their way?
Perhaps. But while the possibility existed of finding a passing boat in a potential shipping lane untold miles to the north, the certainty of Sophie and their island was a day or two’s paddle directly to the south. And he also knew that without the survival gear, she didn’t stand a chance there by herself. If he went chasing after phantom boats, not only might he perish in the attempt—after all, he had no flares left to fire—but he would almost certainly doom her as well. If he went much farther from the island, it would be too far to turn around. He had been given a log, and that would have to be salvation enough. He couldn’t leave her; that just wasn’t an option.