The Mer'hyer

Chapter 5 -- The Doll

No other former students arrived at the stagecoach, forcing Ron to embark on a very lonely journey to the Hamlet shore. It was cold when he stepped out, wet beneath his boots. He breathed in the salty air and the driver pointed to the ship he would be taking across the channel. It hard to see through the damp air that was almost as thick as fog, but with the help of the blue lantern light he could see a small ship in the harbour. He carried himself forth and waved off the driver who hardly even noticed him as he whipped the frog-like horses to carry on back down the road.

The young man made his way down to the docks, crunching his feet against barnacles. Small fishing huts were at either side of him nearly dripping with some kind of liquid-rot on the wood. The wood that wasn't rotting and the stone that would otherwise lay barren, coral and molluscs covered nearly every inch of their surfaces. Below the docks, into the waters were wooden pillars and massive boulders covered in mussels. Nets hung like the vines of a jungle above him, like webs waiting to catch prey. Ron felt cold as his stockings began to soak, but he heard the calls of men ahead in the direction he was pointed towards, and so he rushed to find his way to them.

It was after only a short dash he could see the boat in clear view, wavering to the soft ripples of the water. It looked sickly green with the rot of its wood and the dead seaweed hanging from each mast. Strange designs were etched into the backside of the ship, like faces mixed with tentacles but obscured by flat reef-like coral and more barnacles. To the bow was a figurehead, resembling a mass of bones and it had a sharp narrow skull to top it all. A railed plank made a path for the slow town's people to walk on as the bluish skinned crewmen guided them onboard. A dead whale with far many more eyes than two was set aside, punctured by at least a dozen spears. It stunk the air as its tail was slowly coiling up by a pulley. The ship must've just come back from a fishing venture, considering how it didn't look at all suited for ferrying people across the channel.

Ron headed forward, joining the line of people in rags and dirtied clothes, their dress far more stodgy than his own; his clothes were more suited for a man of education while the common folk around wore their white working dress shirts, their robes, and dark collared coats. He was hardly noticed by any of them until the crewman, who seemed to have a large table coral wedged into his left shoulder, raised a barnacle covered hand. "The toll sir..." he grumbled. "One shillin', one pence be all it is."

"There's a toll?" Ron asked. "I was told my travel would be accommodated. At no charge."

"Oh, are ye a scholar?"

"A former student, yes."

He clicked a solid looking tongue and closed his lips with a scrape. "Yer name then?"

"Ron Alrich Luddveil," the young man said with dignity, feeling a sense he'll have to say his name many more times before the end of this.

"Hmm..." the pale-skinned crewman looked down, barely able to open his right eye from the sea-like growth covering it all. "I do remember a name o' that sort. Ye're the first we've had today—n' by the looks of it, I suspect ye'd be the last. Now head on through!"

The seaman budged him, pushing him ahead onto the plank. And so, Ron obliged, walking across the long board and dropped onto the boat. Scanning the area, he decided to go up by the rail of the ship's bow where less people stood around. He waited there for about half an hour. Then the shipped sailed off into the Baringal Channel, until soon the shore was completely obscured by fog.

Ron stood quiet for a long while. He watched the greenish waters below him flutter and ripple. Below the waters he could see enormous bulbous shapes, like physical manifestations of blight and confusion. Creatures of unimaginable shape and horror gnawed aimlessly, crying out in a muffled, dreary whines, as if echoing from a distance forever afar. Tentacles flowed by, along with grey sacks of flesh covered in membranes, almost like the cells he once studied under the microscope. Ron felt he could identify the massive organelles, with the golgi apparatus, and the ribosomes, and the endoplasmic reticulum. But even then there were differences, manipulations. Hardly any of it what it was supposed to be. All of these creatures were simply beyond nature, beyond anything he studied in university. All he could do is describe how these things are like the things that he does know, but they will never be things he will come understand—at least for now, that is.