Into the Endless Sea of Night
Peter Mark May
We left the Narrows and New York City behind in the April of 1934 to sail back to my homeland of England, to dock in Southampton several weeks hence. I myself, a fit twenty-eight year old, had just left the employ of an American University in Massachusetts; as a diver for wrecks of archaeological interest in Boston harbour.
Times were hard and with no further employment forthcoming, I decided to head back to the green hills and gentler pace of my English home near Havant.
The first week of our journey on the Augustine was cold, but the sea was calm and overall the experience was not too unpleasant. I had struck up a friendship with an ex-police inspector, now in his sixties, by the name of Morris. He also had been in Boston, setting up a little business venture and undertaking some investigation of the private kind for an American acquaintance he referred to only as ‘Howard’.
I had picked up the habit of smoking American cigarettes since my engagement in Boston. Morris liked to smoke a pipe after dinner, and we often found each other at the starboard rail and soon engaged ourselves in conversation each night on various topics. In the latter half of our second week of voyaging together, I rather candidly asked him about the purpose of his investigations.
At this point my new acquaintance became coy and reluctant to answer my questions.
When I pressed him again over late night brandies, he asked me a question I had never been asked before.
‘Do you have an open mind, Hodgson?’ he asked. ‘Have not you seen things with your own eyes that science nor theology could explain?’
Nothing at once sprang to mind, but I was reminded of a dear friend of mine, Cartwright, who had two years previously dived the hidden depths of the Wookey Hole Caves near Wells in Somerset and who had returned with frightening tales of the fantastical.
Morris roared with laughter at this and clapped me hard on the back several times, before breaking into a coughing fit.
We were not the only passengers to frequent the ship’s rails at night after drinks or a hand of Rummy. A very expansive gentlemen of both mouth and waist called Guy Samson sometimes butted into our conversations with wild boasts of books he had written and adventures he had enjoyed in the Americas, Africa and other such exotic places.
So Morris and I moved to the Port side of the ship to avoid the odious and boorish Mr Samson. It was from there that we observed the presence of a lady dressed in black on the lower deck. She had both her gloved hands on the rail and was gazing out into the dark night and sea below.
Morris let out a loud startled cough and pulled his pipe from his lips, as the woman put one boot on the lower rail. It seemed to him and to I that she meant to throw herself over the side.
Morris’s cough had alerted the lady to our presence and with a turn of her head, she fled back into the standard cabins. We descended to where we had seen her, but she was gone.
We informed the Chief Steward of what we had observed, but with no clear description, and forty or more female passengers on the ship, detection would be difficult.
Morris and I stayed up well past midnight, just in case, but we did not see her again. We finally said our goodnights at around one and went back to our respective berths.
The next morning dawned grey and uninviting, and I slept late and took my breakfast inside my cabin. It was not until eleven that I finally made my way up on deck, to find a cold fog surrounding the ship from bow to stern.
‘Ah there you are Hodgson,’ said Morris from the misty deck ahead. I heard his voice before his large frame emerged from the mists ahead of me.
‘Bought the London air with you I see?’ I replied jovially.
‘Why it does have a certain funk to it, this sea fog.’ Morris stopped before me, a sprightly and strong man even in his retirement.
‘Are you sure that’s not the chef overcooking the eggs again old chap?’ I joked, but there was indeed a faint whiff of sulphur clinging in the damp air.
‘Fancy a stroll to the prow, Hodgson? I do love a good fog,’ Morris said, breathing in a lungful of the sea air, before lighting his pipe.
‘Why not,’ I replied, having little else in the way of entertainment planned for the day.
The ship slowed to a quarter speed as we reached our destination. We watched as best we could from the deck above, as two of the ship’s crew brought lanterns to the ship’s prow. Above us, next to the ship’s bridge, came the braying of the fog horn, which was the only thing apart from the engines we could hear.
We were not alone in our fog-bound vigil for long, as several of the passengers joined us along the rail; including the incorrigible Guy Samson and an attractive widow by the name of Olivia Valentine.
The prow of the ship was lost in the dense fog, and only the two lanterns could be seen moving to and fro. The atmosphere was gloomy, damp and dull; yet somewhere miles above our heads it was nearly noon.
Abruptly the ship gave a sudden soundless lurch to starboard sending some of the passengers, including the rotund Samson, crashing to the deck.
The two sailors afore cried out, but their screams were cut short, like a squall wind had passed across them. Then the ship righted itself, and we heard the squeal of metal rubbing up against something before the ship stopped dead in the water. The engines still roared below, and the propellers turned, but the Augustine did not budge an inch.
‘Iceberg!’ cried one excitable fellow passenger; who then grabbed his wife and child and ran off aft to the nearest lifeboat.
The fog still surrounded us, yet something vaguely dark and at least fifty feet tall could be seen before the prow of the ship.
On the bridge, the Captain sent the First Officer down to investigate, while he gave the order to increase the ship’s speed to full. The Augustine did not budge and fearing that his ship had hit another vessel, iceberg or reef, the Captain ordered the ship into full reverse.
By the time the First Officer had made it down to the prow with four sailors at his heel, the Captain had given up and ordered a full stop. We heard the engines quieten, and a deathly hush fell over us all.
‘Did we hit another ship?’ I asked vaguely to no one in particular.
‘Come on, let’s take a closer look,’ said Morris lightly punching the top of my arm.
I nodded and followed Morris down onto the main deck, with only a few of our fellow passengers following. We headed past the mighty chains of the hauled up anchors until the backs of the crew, and First Officer came into view through the fog.Morris and I, with only Mrs Valentine and Samson now behind us, stopped just behind the crew and looked up, following their upturned gaze.The front thirty feet of the prow of the ship had gone. Not really gone, but it was not at all visible from our close position, and it had nothing to do with the denseness of the fog. No vessel or iceberg blocked our passage, something more puzzling and fantastic had stopped the Augustine in its tracks.In the wall of fog, there was a black fissure rising in a conical tear fifty feet up into the misty air. It seemed like the Augustine had punched through the fabric of the world and the front of the ship was wedged into this umbra crack.
‘Roberts, give me that.’ The First Officer held out his hand to a sailor who held a flare pistol. Roberts passed the pistol to the First Officer, who pointed it at the centre of the dark space and fired.
‘What the deuce is that?’ I heard Samson ask incredulously behind us as the flare headed into the black crack and disappeared without shedding any light on the situation or what lay beyond.
‘An ice cave?’ Mrs Valentine offered in her sharp American tones.
‘Curse this fog, what have we hit?’ The First Officer took off his cap and scratched at his blond hair.
‘Let me take a closer look sir?’ piped up the youngest seaman, standing next to his superior.
‘Okay Millward, but do not take any unnecessary risks m’lad.’ The First Officer patted the sailor on the shoulder firmly. Morris moved forward to stand with the crew, and I followed suit, trying to fathom the riddle before us.
‘There must be something hidden in the fog, but for the life of me I cannot reason what it could be?’ I said.
‘Pertwee; go fetch the Captain,’ the First Officer pointed at another sailor and clicked his fingers twice to convey the urgency of his order.
Meanwhile, Millward had reached the edge of the black fissure and stood on the prow of the ship only a foot away.
‘It has no smell, Sir,’ he called back, ‘and no colour to it but pitch.’ Millward raised the lantern in his hand, his eyes squinting to see anything but the blackness before his eyes.
‘Be careful lad,’ Morris called out as the young sailor began to walk along the line of the fissure, towards the starboard rail.
‘It’s like a line of night across th–’ Millward did not finish his sentence, because he tripped on something hidden on the deck by the fog and pitched into the darkness, arms pin-wheeling as he fell.The crew, plus Morris and I, hurried forward to his aid, but he had totally vanished into the unknown blackness in front of us.
‘Millward, can you hear me lad?’ First Officer Greenwood called with cupped hands into the veil that seemed to cross the prow of the Augustine. The glass smooth, yet matt black hole that had swallowed the front of the ship did not move, ripple or show any signs of responding.
‘What in the realm of Poseidon is that?’ Captain West had come up behind us, and was, like us, trying to make sense of what he saw.
‘That is what we are trying to fathom, Captain,’ Morris replied, turning slightly to face him.
‘What about the men I sent afore with lanterns?’ Captain West asked.
‘Both missing, Sir, and young Millward fell also, Sir, into that … that …’ Greenwood pointed, taking great care not to touch the umbra film not two feet in front of his nose.
The Captain reached into his pocket and pulled out a tanner and lobbed it underarm at the black wall. The coin passed through the dark barrier without a trace, and if it hit the deck on the other side, we heard no sound.
‘Roberts, fetch two ropes and a boathook from the stores,’ the Captain ordered. ‘Now I suggest everyone takes a few steps back.’
‘A wise suggestion,’ Morris said, and everyone retreated to within three yards of the fissure.
Roberts returned shortly with a seven-foot pole tipped with a metal hook, and two coils of rope, one over each shoulder.
‘Hand me that boat hook, Roberts,’ the Captain ordered, and the sailor obliged.
The Captain inched slowly forward with the boat hook held out before him. As the hook neared the dark barrier, Captain West lifted it. The Captain steadied his planted feet like he was preparing for the opening pull of a tug-of-war contest and slowly lowered the hook down into the blackness.
There were no swirls or eddies as the Captain moved the boat hook up and down and side to side in the unknown phenomena.
‘Do you feel any pull or resistance?’ Morris asked keenly from beside me.
‘Not a thing,’ the Captain replied, and pushed the pole at least two feet forward, where it disappeared like it was going into a barrel of black treacle.
‘Try lowering it to the deck Captain,’ I called out, wondering if the ship still existed on the other side. Perhaps the black crack had consumed it.
The Captain moved forward a little, but still kept a respectable distance from the fissure. He proceeded to tap down like a blind man with a white stick and then moved the hook in a three-yard arc from left to right.
‘The deck still lies beyond.’ The Captain turned and smiled at the assembled throng and then pulled the boat hook back from the inky darkness. It was still intact, but had a crystallised coating, like a frost upon its curved end.Captain West pulled the pole towards him and touched the upper part with his gloved hand. He quickly pulled away and the boat hook dropped to the deck with a bang that made us all jump.
‘Is it hot?’ cried Mrs Valentine, her black-gloved hands going to her mouth.
‘No lady, it's cold like it’s been embedded in an icebox for a week,’ the Captain replied, a bemused look on his face.
‘Then we did hit an iceberg, and this is some sort of ice cave.’ Guy Samson waved a hand towards the dark crack in the fog, grasping for a rational explanation.
‘I do not think so Mister Samson,’ Morris replied dismissively.
‘Then what is it then man?’ Samson retorted, not at all used to being dismissed or his point of view not being taken as the gospel truth.
‘An entrance maybe, yet to no place any man has ever ventured or mapped before,’ Morris mused, looking at the edges of the blackness.
‘It sounds like the Inspector has been reading too much of Mister Wells and Mister Verne’s fantasies at bedtime,’ Samson said, looking around and snorting, but nobody found the remark amusing.
‘Captain, is it possible to launch a boat to investigate this occurrence at sea level?’ Morris asked.
‘We are of the same mind, Sir,’ the Captain replied, with a glance at Samson.
‘I should like to tag along, if I may?’ I asked quickly before the buffoon Samson could volunteer himself.
‘First Officer Greenwood, launch a boat with six crew and as many flares and lanterns as you can carry,’ Captain West turned to his second-in-command, ‘and take Mister Hodgson along with you.’
‘Could I come too?’ Guy Samson raised an arm to get the Captain’s attention.
‘Mister Hodgson is an experienced diver and seaman, Mister Samson,’ Captain West stated firmly. ‘We need your expertise up here.’
I felt like clapping old West on the back several times. If old Westy ever gave up life on the ocean waves, he could find great employ in His Majesty’s Diplomatic Service.
‘Just observe from a distance, old chap: don’t go too near,’ warned Morris, his pipe clenched in his teeth as he spoke.
‘Understood,’ I replied as I raced off to dress down a bit and find the thickest sweater to wear. I was very conscious of the fact that the young widow Valentine watched my every movement until we were parted by the thickness of the fog.
Luckily the Augustine was a large enough passenger ship to have a motor launch onboard. I sat at the prow, with lanterns upon two poles as we made for the front of the ship. The sea was strangely calm as though we were upon the Serpentine in Hyde Park rather than in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. The launch soon arrived about eight yards from the grey hull of the ship, on the port side. The man on the tiller slowed the launch right down as we approached the prow of the Augustine. We peered through the fog to see that the black fissure that held the ship also went down the side of the hull and into the sea. Only –USTINE and –LFAST, could be seen on the ship’s hull. The rest of AUGUSTINE and BELFAST (the dock where the ship was built) were swallowed up by the black hole in the fog.
‘Can we skirt the blackness and go to where the prow should be?’ I asked the First Officer beside me.
‘Of course,’ he nodded, wanting to know more himself. ‘MacDonald, take us past that darkness at a safe distance to the prow of the ship.,
‘Aye, aye, Sir,’ MacDonald replied, and revved the engine to half-speed. We moved past the line of where the Augustine met the phenomena and slowed to a halt.
‘Mary Mother of God save us,’ cried one of the crew.
‘Pipe down Gunn,’ Greenwood ordered, but then saw what Gunn, the rest of the launch crew and I had seen.
‘This cannot be,’ I muttered.
‘It is not possible!’ Greenwood exclaimed in wonder.
For we had now rounded the black crack in the fog and where the grey hulled prow of the Augustine should have been, was just mist and the open sea. We turned and moved forward through the water, placing the launch where steel, wood and the front of the ship should be: yet there was nothing but an icy wall of white fog. Not even the black fissure beyond its axis was visible; the whole front of the Augustine was simply not there.
‘I’m getting us out of here,’ the First Officer said in a scared voice, and he gave the order to turn about. We kept our distance and went past the black fissure at full speed this time. As we passed, the inky crevice that the Augustine was wedged in, came back into view.
On returning to the ship and heading along the deck with the First Officer, we found that the situation onboard had moved on somewhat.
Guy Samson, adventurer extraordinaire, was standing by the fissure with one of the ropes that Roberts had brought earlier around his waist.
‘Don’t be a fool man, you don’t know what lies beyond that black veil,’ Morris shouted, quite agitated by the stout man.
‘I will not let you or anyone steal my thunder, Morris,’ Guy Samson replied. ‘I am the most qualified person here, so someone hand me a lantern.’
‘Give him a lantern,’ the Captain said, having given up arguing with the writer/adventurer. Samson would always win any argument, even though he was wrong, by browbeating opponents into submission with his loud baritone voice.
‘Don’t go in there Samson, I’m pleading you,’ I said as I came to stand next to Morris, with Greenwood at Mrs Valentine’s side.
‘You have had your turn, Hodgson, now let the professional take charge.’ Samson took the lantern from a crew member, without so much as a ‘thank you’ and turned towards the widow Valentine.
‘Would you permit me a good luck kiss my lady?’ Samson bowed as much as his gut, clothing and rope would allow.
‘I wish you well Mister Samson, but that is all,’ she replied, lines of disgust on her pretty countenance. ‘For I fear you’ll need luck, more than the touch of my lips to keep you safe in there.’
‘Ah, perhaps then on my return good lady,’ Samson blustered, and with two crew members holding the rope he took a nervous deep breath and walked through the black wall. Like some Indian rope trick, his tether appeared out of the blackness a few feet up from the deck. I moved closer as the rope began to be pulled forward, disappearing into the inky darkness and whatever lay beyond. Then after only a few seconds the rope began to lift up into the fissure, as though Samson was climbing up a steep incline on the other side. Up and up the rope ran until at last it stopped somewhere lost above our eyesight in the fog bank.
‘Shall we pull ’im back, Sir?’ one of rope holders asked the Captain.
‘This is queer,’ I said before the Captain could reply.
‘Not yet, he might have found Millward.’
Then the rope suddenly began to run into the fissure at an alarming rate. The men holding it cursed and dropped the rope as it burnt the skin from their palms and fingers.The first action came from an unexpected source. Mrs Valentine headed straight to the end of the coil of rope and tied it quickly to the starboard railing. She just finished her last knot, of which a naval man would have been proud, when the rope went taut. The rope was emerging only halfway up the strange hole in the fog now, and the rest of us rushed to heave it and Samson back.With all our strength, Morris, the six crew and officers and I began to pull the rope back to the Augustine side of the crack. For some reason, Samson, giving kudos to his name, was resisting eight men, or had something else on the other side got hold of him?
‘He might have fallen over the side in there,’ First Officer Greenwood offered as a suggestion.
‘It feels like we are reeling in a whale,’ I added, just a second before the weight on the other side vanished, and we all fell into a heap, to a man.
The Captain, who still wore his gloves, pulled the icy rope back to our side of the fissure with no further resistance. Only half the length returned to the ship covered in a silver frost, and the end was sheared neatly in half.
‘Maybe I should have given him that kiss,’ Mrs Valentine said, as I stood up beside her.
‘I am glad you didn’t,’ I replied, with more than my usual candour in such situations, but this was far from a normal situation.
She smiled for the first time, and it fair warmed my heart on that cold, damp, foggy deck.
‘What do we do now, Sir, send out an SOS?’ the First Officer asked.
‘I suppose so.’ The Captain removed his cap and scratched his thinning locks. ‘I wouldn’t send anyone else in there without a suit of armour.’
‘Captain West, I would like to volunteer to go in there,’ I pointed to the murky barrier, ignoring the gasp of anguish from the widow beside me.
‘Do you have a suit of armour then, Mister Hodgson?’ the Captain asked with heavy sarcasm.
‘No, Sir, but I have the next best thing,’ I smiled, wondering how long it would take to reclaim my diving suit and apparatus from the ship’s hold.
An hour later, and with the Augustine still caught in the fissure in the surrounding fog, I was nearly ready to enter the black crack myself.
My petrol-driven pump was being looked after by the ship’s engineer, and all I required was to have my helmet fitted. I had donned three layers of thick woollen socks, an all-in-one American-style set of underwear, thick trousers with another leather pair over them, and a shirt and two pullovers. On my hands, I wore fur lined gloves and over them, rubber and canvas waterproof gloves attached to my suit with air-tight brass cuffs. Around my waist was a belt, with a diver’s knife and torch attached. A pair of heavy boots were fitted to the ankles of my diving suit with similar brass cuffs to those on my wrists.
Morris stood next to me, holding my diving helmet, while the First Officer re-checked my gear for me. I was about to pull my balaclava down over my head when Mrs Valentine approached.‘You don’t have to do this, just to impress a girl you know,’ she smiled at me, but her eyes were a hair’s breadth away from tears.
‘I feel I would fly to the Moon and back to try and impress you, Mrs Valentine,’ I replied, and patted her arm as best I could.
‘Call me Olivia, please.’
‘Then you better call me Christian, Olivia.’ I would have bowed, but in my diving suit, it would have been rather difficult.
‘I …’ she began, then paused. ‘I want to thank you both for saving my life the other night.’ She looked from my bemused face to that of Morris.
‘You were the poor lady on the rails the other night,’ Morris said leaning forward, not wanting all and sundry to hear.
‘I was,’ she nodded and looked down at my lead-weighted boots. ‘My young son and husband were killed a year ago last night in an automobile accident, and I just wanted to join them.’
‘All ready to go, Sir.’ The First officer clapped me on the back and gave me an encouraging smile.
‘I have to go,’ I said to her a might too coldly. Not wanting to show my emotions before the ship’s assembled crew.
‘I understand.’ She reached up to roll my warm, but itchy, balaclava down over my head.
‘I will be back before you can say, Charlie Chaplin,’ I joked, making levity of the situation.
‘Charlie Chaplin,’ she said briskly, and with tears rolling down her pale cheeks, she walked off to stand at the port rail.
‘Now don’t take any risks, Hodgson. Just see what is beyond that,’ Morris pointed towards the fissure with the end of his pipe, ‘and report back.’
‘I hope I can find the missing crew and that damn fool Samson,’ I replied, while inwardly preparing myself for the lonely feel of the helmet going on.
‘Oh and take care old chap,’ Morris put an oil lantern with a glass enclosed wick, into my left hand.
‘I have my electric battery torch,’ I said, tapping the torch that hung from my belt.
‘Always best to have something in reserve.’Morris nodded to the ship’s First Officer and together they lifted my brass diving helmet up and lowered it down over my head. With a turn, it was secured and then bolted in at the back. My world suddenly shrank to the size of a goldfish bowl. The pump was working and blew air into the helmet around my head. The First Officer pointed to the pump behind me and gave a thumbs up signal, which I reciprocated, indicating everything was working as it should be. With a quick glance through my left porthole to look at the lovely Mrs Valentine, I was ready to go. Morris placed the two air pipes in my right hand and without further ado, I began my slow walk towards the strange phenomenon that held our ship fast in its black grip.When I was standing directly before it, the black wall looked dense and dark, like American molasses. I lifted the lantern high and stepped forward, closing my eyes as I did so, as some primordial deeply embedded subconscious fear overtook my mind.When I opened them again a mere second later, I was in a very different world. The first things that struck me were that it was night time on the other side of the fissure and that there was not an inch of fog to be seen.
I lowered the lantern that Morris had handed me as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, and was glad to see the deck of the Augustine still beneath my leaded boots. A thin layer of icy crystallised dew covered the deck as far as my lantern made out. Looking up I could see stars in the night sky above the ship.
I decided to move to the port rail to see what held the prow of the Augustine in this strange twilight world. I only got two steps before the lantern flickered three times and then went out. Dropping my air tubes I reached down and grabbed my torch from my belt and with great difficulty, because of my cumbersome gloves, switched it on.
I was shocked as the torch beam revealed a frost that was already starting to form upon the glass of the lantern and in that same instant I began to feel it through my suit and layered clothing.As the lantern was of no further use, I threw it over the nearby port rail. Then I stood amazed as the lantern kept spinning and turning in a straight line as it passed the rail. It continued onwards and outwards into the cold darkness, without ever showing any signs of falling.I moved my legs towards the port rail, keeping my torch beam on the gravity-defying lantern as it sailed out towards the stars and out of sight.
I made it to the icy rail and bent over as far as I could, my torch extended before me in my gloved hand. There I found a discovery, one of many to follow that shocked my beliefs to the very core.
Around the sides and surely underneath the keel of the prow of the Augustine was a vast waterfall of frozen seawater. The ice flow extended out ten feet at the side, and goodness knows how thick it was.
‘The sea has been frozen solid,’ I muttered to myself, and as I spoke, I noticed cold puffs of air rise up from my mouth inside my brass helmet. I was glad that the air coming from the other side of the fissure was coming through at body temperature now, as the pump got warmer the longer it was used.
Leaving the port rail. I headed forward towards the prow of the ship, to see if I could find any signs of Samson and the missing crew before I became too cold to move my limbs. I did not hold up much hope of finding them alive, as the cold dark world on this side of the fissure must have surely frozen them to death by now.
I hurried as best I could and became aware of a chattering sound. I soon realised it was only my own teeth. I had never felt such cold as this and knew I would have to traverse back through the world-dividing hole soon before I became a permanent ice sculpture here.
Reaching the end of the ship, where port and starboard rails converged into a v-shape, I became aware of a glow far off in the night.
This glow began to increase rapidly in a thin elliptical shape, and as the orange light increased and spread, it raced around to reveal a round far off object, so immense that I could not understand what I was seeing. Other round bodies became visible, yet no dawn arrived, only the spherical celestial masses which grew in number. The light crept on around the shapes until five great orbs could be seen of varying colours, shapes, distances and sizes.
‘My Lord God,’ I whispered, and had to wipe away the frost from the outside of my face-plate to see.
These shapes before me were stars and planets of a size and proximity that no-one had seen before. I had been at sea many times and had known a few astronomers during my Boston stay. These fellows would have given their right arms for just one glimpse of this alien constellation. The grey plant to my right was so vast only a quarter of its great bulk could I see. Blazing light from a sun covered by the incalculable mass of the grey world shone across the dark heavens to settle upon the central and most eye-catching planet. It was purple in hue with continents of mauve, peppered with swirling clouds of indigo. The freezing cold had penetrated deep into my bones now, and I knew I had to leave. Once suitably warmed, I could once more take the journey through the black veil of night into this other dimension of God’s creation.I was half turned to retrace my steps back to the safety of the fog-bound side of the Augustine when movement caught my eye.
Turning on legs that felt like they were aflame, but gripped by the cold, I saw tiny specks appear from the purple planet dead ahead and maybe thousands of miles away from me.I lost count as hundreds of these small things darted about, perhaps evidencing that they were individual creatures and not space rocks or comets. Thousands now zoomed across and around the planet like a shoal of fish. This seemed to me a very familiar movement. I had witnessed shoals of small fish before, and they were usually followed by larger denizens of the deep.It wasn’t long before something much larger arrived. Something more massive and beyond scale that could send a sane man mad just trying to calculate its enormity. From behind the large grey planet, yet many leagues distant from me, it came.
Larger than the planet of purple, it moved through the stars with great undulations of its grey leviathan body. It was twice the size of the purple planet and maybe ten times its length. If it had eyes, then I could not see them, yet it had a mouth of sorts, round, cavernous and filled with silver teeth, much like the lamprey fish of Earth’s seas.
Finally, the cold and the sight of this nightmare grey colossus of the stars, caused me to fall on my side, a shivering wreck of a man. I knew I should try and drag myself back to the other side of the Augustine and safety, but my body was already too weak, and my mind would not leave this place. With great effort and my last ounce of strength I wiped the frost from my face plate again and watched this creature, that surely was not of God’s creation, advance on the unsuspecting planet with its mouth wide open to consume it.I wondered vaguely if there was some form of human life on that world or other sentient beings that had evolved. Then I watched, for I could do little else, in morbid fascination as the great star beast brought its jaws to bear on the purple world and sundered almost half the world in two and swallowed half the planet half deep inside its odious body.
The rest of the purple world seemed to split asunder as its core exploded outwards, with a soundless explosion of light and debris.The great space Proteus seemed unaffected by this, but the gnat creatures that led the way like pilot fish were blown across the stars.My numb limbs gave way now, and I collapsed sideways onto the icy deck of the Augustine’s prow, which had travelled farther than any ship that had ever been built.
Then I remember being buffeted like an earthquake had hit the ship and something flew into my vision. I turned my neck so I could see through my right sided porthole. One of the gnat creatures had escaped the destruction of the purple star and was hovering above me on gossamer wings. The boat beneath me continued to be rocked by the shock waves of the destroyed world.
The creature clicked together two great pincers that were attached to its body, yet it had no head, eyes or nostrils, but somehow it sensed me. Its body was covered with tiny cilia which moved and waved as it hung above me. in the cold air. There were longer fronds waving from its sides, and flushes of colour played over its surface like those on a cuttlefish.
I wondered if hyperthermia or the creature would end my life first, as I lay there so far from home. The darkness took me.
I awoke to find myself in the sick bay of the Augustine; it was day, and the sunlight streamed through the nearby portholes. I could hear engines and movement, and I nearly whooped with joy: the ship was moving again and at full speed. With stiff arms and pains in my feet, I pulled myself up into a sitting position.
‘Doctor, he’s awake,’ came the sweet American tones of Olivia Valentine, sat with a blanket over her lap, in a chair by my bed.
‘Steady there, son, you’ve had quite a rough time of it of late,’ said the ship’s doctor as he hurried to my side to give me the once over. I reached out a bandaged hand from the bedcovers, and Olivia clasped it in her warm hands.
Charlie Chaplin,’ I said, and smiled.
‘Charlie Chaplin,’ she smiled back, tears of relief flooding down her enchanting cheeks.
‘Delirious, the both of them,’ the doctor muttered, putting his stethoscope to his ears and my chest.
‘We’ve broken free from the hole in space?’
‘Yes,’ she said and kissed my bandaged hand. ‘You saved us all, Christian.’
‘Did I?’ I asked. ‘The things I saw there, Olivia … No man will believe me!’
‘I’m no man, but I’m darn sure that they will.’
‘How can you be so sure? I’m not sure what I saw. It could have been hallucinations brought on by the freezing temperatures.’
‘Trust me, they will,’ she winked.
The next day, in a wheelchair used onboard for the more elderly and infirm passengers, Olivia and Morris wheeled me to the ship’s upper hold. The frostbite in my hands and feet had not been too bad, though I did lose two toes on my right foot. At the entrance to the hold were two crewmen armed with rifles. Inside were Captain West and First Officer Greenwood, both armed with revolvers. In an iron cage, surrounded by a circle of salt (which was Morris’s idea) was the gnat creature I had seen before the ship had been pushed back into normal space by the shockwaves of the exploding purple star.
I stared at its strange thin fronds and noted that its colouring was mostly grey now. Its large pincers clicked as it attacked the bars of its cage.
I wondered how far away in the heavens that strange sun and those planets had been.
As I staggered back out into the sunlight, I trembled inside. How long would the leviathan space Proteus take before it reached the Milky Way and our own planet Earth?
Peter Mark May
We left the Narrows and New York City behind in the April of 1934 to sail back to my homeland of England, to dock in Southampton several weeks hence. I myself, a fit twenty-eight year old, had just left the employ of an American University in Massachusetts; as a diver for wrecks of archaeological interest in Boston harbour.
Times were hard and with no further employment forthcoming, I decided to head back to the green hills and gentler pace of my English home near Havant.
The first week of our journey on the Augustine was cold, but the sea was calm and overall the experience was not too unpleasant. I had struck up a friendship with an ex-police inspector, now in his sixties, by the name of Morris. He also had been in Boston, setting up a little business venture and undertaking some investigation of the private kind for an American acquaintance he referred to only as ‘Howard’.
I had picked up the habit of smoking American cigarettes since my engagement in Boston. Morris liked to smoke a pipe after dinner, and we often found each other at the starboard rail and soon engaged ourselves in conversation each night on various topics. In the latter half of our second week of voyaging together, I rather candidly asked him about the purpose of his investigations.
At this point my new acquaintance became coy and reluctant to answer my questions.
When I pressed him again over late night brandies, he asked me a question I had never been asked before.
‘Do you have an open mind, Hodgson?’ he asked. ‘Have not you seen things with your own eyes that science nor theology could explain?’
Nothing at once sprang to mind, but I was reminded of a dear friend of mine, Cartwright, who had two years previously dived the hidden depths of the Wookey Hole Caves near Wells in Somerset and who had returned with frightening tales of the fantastical.
Morris roared with laughter at this and clapped me hard on the back several times, before breaking into a coughing fit.
We were not the only passengers to frequent the ship’s rails at night after drinks or a hand of Rummy. A very expansive gentlemen of both mouth and waist called Guy Samson sometimes butted into our conversations with wild boasts of books he had written and adventures he had enjoyed in the Americas, Africa and other such exotic places.
So Morris and I moved to the Port side of the ship to avoid the odious and boorish Mr Samson. It was from there that we observed the presence of a lady dressed in black on the lower deck. She had both her gloved hands on the rail and was gazing out into the dark night and sea below.
Morris let out a loud startled cough and pulled his pipe from his lips, as the woman put one boot on the lower rail. It seemed to him and to I that she meant to throw herself over the side.
Morris’s cough had alerted the lady to our presence and with a turn of her head, she fled back into the standard cabins. We descended to where we had seen her, but she was gone.
We informed the Chief Steward of what we had observed, but with no clear description, and forty or more female passengers on the ship, detection would be difficult.
Morris and I stayed up well past midnight, just in case, but we did not see her again. We finally said our goodnights at around one and went back to our respective berths.
The next morning dawned grey and uninviting, and I slept late and took my breakfast inside my cabin. It was not until eleven that I finally made my way up on deck, to find a cold fog surrounding the ship from bow to stern.
‘Ah there you are Hodgson,’ said Morris from the misty deck ahead. I heard his voice before his large frame emerged from the mists ahead of me.
‘Bought the London air with you I see?’ I replied jovially.
‘Why it does have a certain funk to it, this sea fog.’ Morris stopped before me, a sprightly and strong man even in his retirement.
‘Are you sure that’s not the chef overcooking the eggs again old chap?’ I joked, but there was indeed a faint whiff of sulphur clinging in the damp air.
‘Fancy a stroll to the prow, Hodgson? I do love a good fog,’ Morris said, breathing in a lungful of the sea air, before lighting his pipe.
‘Why not,’ I replied, having little else in the way of entertainment planned for the day.
The ship slowed to a quarter speed as we reached our destination. We watched as best we could from the deck above, as two of the ship’s crew brought lanterns to the ship’s prow. Above us, next to the ship’s bridge, came the braying of the fog horn, which was the only thing apart from the engines we could hear.
We were not alone in our fog-bound vigil for long, as several of the passengers joined us along the rail; including the incorrigible Guy Samson and an attractive widow by the name of Olivia Valentine.
The prow of the ship was lost in the dense fog, and only the two lanterns could be seen moving to and fro. The atmosphere was gloomy, damp and dull; yet somewhere miles above our heads it was nearly noon.
Abruptly the ship gave a sudden soundless lurch to starboard sending some of the passengers, including the rotund Samson, crashing to the deck.
The two sailors afore cried out, but their screams were cut short, like a squall wind had passed across them. Then the ship righted itself, and we heard the squeal of metal rubbing up against something before the ship stopped dead in the water. The engines still roared below, and the propellers turned, but the Augustine did not budge an inch.
‘Iceberg!’ cried one excitable fellow passenger; who then grabbed his wife and child and ran off aft to the nearest lifeboat.
The fog still surrounded us, yet something vaguely dark and at least fifty feet tall could be seen before the prow of the ship.
On the bridge, the Captain sent the First Officer down to investigate, while he gave the order to increase the ship’s speed to full. The Augustine did not budge and fearing that his ship had hit another vessel, iceberg or reef, the Captain ordered the ship into full reverse.
By the time the First Officer had made it down to the prow with four sailors at his heel, the Captain had given up and ordered a full stop. We heard the engines quieten, and a deathly hush fell over us all.
‘Did we hit another ship?’ I asked vaguely to no one in particular.
‘Come on, let’s take a closer look,’ said Morris lightly punching the top of my arm.
I nodded and followed Morris down onto the main deck, with only a few of our fellow passengers following. We headed past the mighty chains of the hauled up anchors until the backs of the crew, and First Officer came into view through the fog.Morris and I, with only Mrs Valentine and Samson now behind us, stopped just behind the crew and looked up, following their upturned gaze.The front thirty feet of the prow of the ship had gone. Not really gone, but it was not at all visible from our close position, and it had nothing to do with the denseness of the fog. No vessel or iceberg blocked our passage, something more puzzling and fantastic had stopped the Augustine in its tracks.In the wall of fog, there was a black fissure rising in a conical tear fifty feet up into the misty air. It seemed like the Augustine had punched through the fabric of the world and the front of the ship was wedged into this umbra crack.
‘Roberts, give me that.’ The First Officer held out his hand to a sailor who held a flare pistol. Roberts passed the pistol to the First Officer, who pointed it at the centre of the dark space and fired.
‘What the deuce is that?’ I heard Samson ask incredulously behind us as the flare headed into the black crack and disappeared without shedding any light on the situation or what lay beyond.
‘An ice cave?’ Mrs Valentine offered in her sharp American tones.
‘Curse this fog, what have we hit?’ The First Officer took off his cap and scratched at his blond hair.
‘Let me take a closer look sir?’ piped up the youngest seaman, standing next to his superior.
‘Okay Millward, but do not take any unnecessary risks m’lad.’ The First Officer patted the sailor on the shoulder firmly. Morris moved forward to stand with the crew, and I followed suit, trying to fathom the riddle before us.
‘There must be something hidden in the fog, but for the life of me I cannot reason what it could be?’ I said.
‘Pertwee; go fetch the Captain,’ the First Officer pointed at another sailor and clicked his fingers twice to convey the urgency of his order.
Meanwhile, Millward had reached the edge of the black fissure and stood on the prow of the ship only a foot away.
‘It has no smell, Sir,’ he called back, ‘and no colour to it but pitch.’ Millward raised the lantern in his hand, his eyes squinting to see anything but the blackness before his eyes.
‘Be careful lad,’ Morris called out as the young sailor began to walk along the line of the fissure, towards the starboard rail.
‘It’s like a line of night across th–’ Millward did not finish his sentence, because he tripped on something hidden on the deck by the fog and pitched into the darkness, arms pin-wheeling as he fell.The crew, plus Morris and I, hurried forward to his aid, but he had totally vanished into the unknown blackness in front of us.
‘Millward, can you hear me lad?’ First Officer Greenwood called with cupped hands into the veil that seemed to cross the prow of the Augustine. The glass smooth, yet matt black hole that had swallowed the front of the ship did not move, ripple or show any signs of responding.
‘What in the realm of Poseidon is that?’ Captain West had come up behind us, and was, like us, trying to make sense of what he saw.
‘That is what we are trying to fathom, Captain,’ Morris replied, turning slightly to face him.
‘What about the men I sent afore with lanterns?’ Captain West asked.
‘Both missing, Sir, and young Millward fell also, Sir, into that … that …’ Greenwood pointed, taking great care not to touch the umbra film not two feet in front of his nose.
The Captain reached into his pocket and pulled out a tanner and lobbed it underarm at the black wall. The coin passed through the dark barrier without a trace, and if it hit the deck on the other side, we heard no sound.
‘Roberts, fetch two ropes and a boathook from the stores,’ the Captain ordered. ‘Now I suggest everyone takes a few steps back.’
‘A wise suggestion,’ Morris said, and everyone retreated to within three yards of the fissure.
Roberts returned shortly with a seven-foot pole tipped with a metal hook, and two coils of rope, one over each shoulder.
‘Hand me that boat hook, Roberts,’ the Captain ordered, and the sailor obliged.
The Captain inched slowly forward with the boat hook held out before him. As the hook neared the dark barrier, Captain West lifted it. The Captain steadied his planted feet like he was preparing for the opening pull of a tug-of-war contest and slowly lowered the hook down into the blackness.
There were no swirls or eddies as the Captain moved the boat hook up and down and side to side in the unknown phenomena.
‘Do you feel any pull or resistance?’ Morris asked keenly from beside me.
‘Not a thing,’ the Captain replied, and pushed the pole at least two feet forward, where it disappeared like it was going into a barrel of black treacle.
‘Try lowering it to the deck Captain,’ I called out, wondering if the ship still existed on the other side. Perhaps the black crack had consumed it.
The Captain moved forward a little, but still kept a respectable distance from the fissure. He proceeded to tap down like a blind man with a white stick and then moved the hook in a three-yard arc from left to right.
‘The deck still lies beyond.’ The Captain turned and smiled at the assembled throng and then pulled the boat hook back from the inky darkness. It was still intact, but had a crystallised coating, like a frost upon its curved end.Captain West pulled the pole towards him and touched the upper part with his gloved hand. He quickly pulled away and the boat hook dropped to the deck with a bang that made us all jump.
‘Is it hot?’ cried Mrs Valentine, her black-gloved hands going to her mouth.
‘No lady, it's cold like it’s been embedded in an icebox for a week,’ the Captain replied, a bemused look on his face.
‘Then we did hit an iceberg, and this is some sort of ice cave.’ Guy Samson waved a hand towards the dark crack in the fog, grasping for a rational explanation.
‘I do not think so Mister Samson,’ Morris replied dismissively.
‘Then what is it then man?’ Samson retorted, not at all used to being dismissed or his point of view not being taken as the gospel truth.
‘An entrance maybe, yet to no place any man has ever ventured or mapped before,’ Morris mused, looking at the edges of the blackness.
‘It sounds like the Inspector has been reading too much of Mister Wells and Mister Verne’s fantasies at bedtime,’ Samson said, looking around and snorting, but nobody found the remark amusing.
‘Captain, is it possible to launch a boat to investigate this occurrence at sea level?’ Morris asked.
‘We are of the same mind, Sir,’ the Captain replied, with a glance at Samson.
‘I should like to tag along, if I may?’ I asked quickly before the buffoon Samson could volunteer himself.
‘First Officer Greenwood, launch a boat with six crew and as many flares and lanterns as you can carry,’ Captain West turned to his second-in-command, ‘and take Mister Hodgson along with you.’
‘Could I come too?’ Guy Samson raised an arm to get the Captain’s attention.
‘Mister Hodgson is an experienced diver and seaman, Mister Samson,’ Captain West stated firmly. ‘We need your expertise up here.’
I felt like clapping old West on the back several times. If old Westy ever gave up life on the ocean waves, he could find great employ in His Majesty’s Diplomatic Service.
‘Just observe from a distance, old chap: don’t go too near,’ warned Morris, his pipe clenched in his teeth as he spoke.
‘Understood,’ I replied as I raced off to dress down a bit and find the thickest sweater to wear. I was very conscious of the fact that the young widow Valentine watched my every movement until we were parted by the thickness of the fog.
Luckily the Augustine was a large enough passenger ship to have a motor launch onboard. I sat at the prow, with lanterns upon two poles as we made for the front of the ship. The sea was strangely calm as though we were upon the Serpentine in Hyde Park rather than in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. The launch soon arrived about eight yards from the grey hull of the ship, on the port side. The man on the tiller slowed the launch right down as we approached the prow of the Augustine. We peered through the fog to see that the black fissure that held the ship also went down the side of the hull and into the sea. Only –USTINE and –LFAST, could be seen on the ship’s hull. The rest of AUGUSTINE and BELFAST (the dock where the ship was built) were swallowed up by the black hole in the fog.
‘Can we skirt the blackness and go to where the prow should be?’ I asked the First Officer beside me.
‘Of course,’ he nodded, wanting to know more himself. ‘MacDonald, take us past that darkness at a safe distance to the prow of the ship.,
‘Aye, aye, Sir,’ MacDonald replied, and revved the engine to half-speed. We moved past the line of where the Augustine met the phenomena and slowed to a halt.
‘Mary Mother of God save us,’ cried one of the crew.
‘Pipe down Gunn,’ Greenwood ordered, but then saw what Gunn, the rest of the launch crew and I had seen.
‘This cannot be,’ I muttered.
‘It is not possible!’ Greenwood exclaimed in wonder.
For we had now rounded the black crack in the fog and where the grey hulled prow of the Augustine should have been, was just mist and the open sea. We turned and moved forward through the water, placing the launch where steel, wood and the front of the ship should be: yet there was nothing but an icy wall of white fog. Not even the black fissure beyond its axis was visible; the whole front of the Augustine was simply not there.
‘I’m getting us out of here,’ the First Officer said in a scared voice, and he gave the order to turn about. We kept our distance and went past the black fissure at full speed this time. As we passed, the inky crevice that the Augustine was wedged in, came back into view.
On returning to the ship and heading along the deck with the First Officer, we found that the situation onboard had moved on somewhat.
Guy Samson, adventurer extraordinaire, was standing by the fissure with one of the ropes that Roberts had brought earlier around his waist.
‘Don’t be a fool man, you don’t know what lies beyond that black veil,’ Morris shouted, quite agitated by the stout man.
‘I will not let you or anyone steal my thunder, Morris,’ Guy Samson replied. ‘I am the most qualified person here, so someone hand me a lantern.’
‘Give him a lantern,’ the Captain said, having given up arguing with the writer/adventurer. Samson would always win any argument, even though he was wrong, by browbeating opponents into submission with his loud baritone voice.
‘Don’t go in there Samson, I’m pleading you,’ I said as I came to stand next to Morris, with Greenwood at Mrs Valentine’s side.
‘You have had your turn, Hodgson, now let the professional take charge.’ Samson took the lantern from a crew member, without so much as a ‘thank you’ and turned towards the widow Valentine.
‘Would you permit me a good luck kiss my lady?’ Samson bowed as much as his gut, clothing and rope would allow.
‘I wish you well Mister Samson, but that is all,’ she replied, lines of disgust on her pretty countenance. ‘For I fear you’ll need luck, more than the touch of my lips to keep you safe in there.’
‘Ah, perhaps then on my return good lady,’ Samson blustered, and with two crew members holding the rope he took a nervous deep breath and walked through the black wall. Like some Indian rope trick, his tether appeared out of the blackness a few feet up from the deck. I moved closer as the rope began to be pulled forward, disappearing into the inky darkness and whatever lay beyond. Then after only a few seconds the rope began to lift up into the fissure, as though Samson was climbing up a steep incline on the other side. Up and up the rope ran until at last it stopped somewhere lost above our eyesight in the fog bank.
‘Shall we pull ’im back, Sir?’ one of rope holders asked the Captain.
‘This is queer,’ I said before the Captain could reply.
‘Not yet, he might have found Millward.’
Then the rope suddenly began to run into the fissure at an alarming rate. The men holding it cursed and dropped the rope as it burnt the skin from their palms and fingers.The first action came from an unexpected source. Mrs Valentine headed straight to the end of the coil of rope and tied it quickly to the starboard railing. She just finished her last knot, of which a naval man would have been proud, when the rope went taut. The rope was emerging only halfway up the strange hole in the fog now, and the rest of us rushed to heave it and Samson back.With all our strength, Morris, the six crew and officers and I began to pull the rope back to the Augustine side of the crack. For some reason, Samson, giving kudos to his name, was resisting eight men, or had something else on the other side got hold of him?
‘He might have fallen over the side in there,’ First Officer Greenwood offered as a suggestion.
‘It feels like we are reeling in a whale,’ I added, just a second before the weight on the other side vanished, and we all fell into a heap, to a man.
The Captain, who still wore his gloves, pulled the icy rope back to our side of the fissure with no further resistance. Only half the length returned to the ship covered in a silver frost, and the end was sheared neatly in half.
‘Maybe I should have given him that kiss,’ Mrs Valentine said, as I stood up beside her.
‘I am glad you didn’t,’ I replied, with more than my usual candour in such situations, but this was far from a normal situation.
She smiled for the first time, and it fair warmed my heart on that cold, damp, foggy deck.
‘What do we do now, Sir, send out an SOS?’ the First Officer asked.
‘I suppose so.’ The Captain removed his cap and scratched his thinning locks. ‘I wouldn’t send anyone else in there without a suit of armour.’
‘Captain West, I would like to volunteer to go in there,’ I pointed to the murky barrier, ignoring the gasp of anguish from the widow beside me.
‘Do you have a suit of armour then, Mister Hodgson?’ the Captain asked with heavy sarcasm.
‘No, Sir, but I have the next best thing,’ I smiled, wondering how long it would take to reclaim my diving suit and apparatus from the ship’s hold.
An hour later, and with the Augustine still caught in the fissure in the surrounding fog, I was nearly ready to enter the black crack myself.
My petrol-driven pump was being looked after by the ship’s engineer, and all I required was to have my helmet fitted. I had donned three layers of thick woollen socks, an all-in-one American-style set of underwear, thick trousers with another leather pair over them, and a shirt and two pullovers. On my hands, I wore fur lined gloves and over them, rubber and canvas waterproof gloves attached to my suit with air-tight brass cuffs. Around my waist was a belt, with a diver’s knife and torch attached. A pair of heavy boots were fitted to the ankles of my diving suit with similar brass cuffs to those on my wrists.
Morris stood next to me, holding my diving helmet, while the First Officer re-checked my gear for me. I was about to pull my balaclava down over my head when Mrs Valentine approached.‘You don’t have to do this, just to impress a girl you know,’ she smiled at me, but her eyes were a hair’s breadth away from tears.
‘I feel I would fly to the Moon and back to try and impress you, Mrs Valentine,’ I replied, and patted her arm as best I could.
‘Call me Olivia, please.’
‘Then you better call me Christian, Olivia.’ I would have bowed, but in my diving suit, it would have been rather difficult.
‘I …’ she began, then paused. ‘I want to thank you both for saving my life the other night.’ She looked from my bemused face to that of Morris.
‘You were the poor lady on the rails the other night,’ Morris said leaning forward, not wanting all and sundry to hear.
‘I was,’ she nodded and looked down at my lead-weighted boots. ‘My young son and husband were killed a year ago last night in an automobile accident, and I just wanted to join them.’
‘All ready to go, Sir.’ The First officer clapped me on the back and gave me an encouraging smile.
‘I have to go,’ I said to her a might too coldly. Not wanting to show my emotions before the ship’s assembled crew.
‘I understand.’ She reached up to roll my warm, but itchy, balaclava down over my head.
‘I will be back before you can say, Charlie Chaplin,’ I joked, making levity of the situation.
‘Charlie Chaplin,’ she said briskly, and with tears rolling down her pale cheeks, she walked off to stand at the port rail.
‘Now don’t take any risks, Hodgson. Just see what is beyond that,’ Morris pointed towards the fissure with the end of his pipe, ‘and report back.’
‘I hope I can find the missing crew and that damn fool Samson,’ I replied, while inwardly preparing myself for the lonely feel of the helmet going on.
‘Oh and take care old chap,’ Morris put an oil lantern with a glass enclosed wick, into my left hand.
‘I have my electric battery torch,’ I said, tapping the torch that hung from my belt.
‘Always best to have something in reserve.’Morris nodded to the ship’s First Officer and together they lifted my brass diving helmet up and lowered it down over my head. With a turn, it was secured and then bolted in at the back. My world suddenly shrank to the size of a goldfish bowl. The pump was working and blew air into the helmet around my head. The First Officer pointed to the pump behind me and gave a thumbs up signal, which I reciprocated, indicating everything was working as it should be. With a quick glance through my left porthole to look at the lovely Mrs Valentine, I was ready to go. Morris placed the two air pipes in my right hand and without further ado, I began my slow walk towards the strange phenomenon that held our ship fast in its black grip.When I was standing directly before it, the black wall looked dense and dark, like American molasses. I lifted the lantern high and stepped forward, closing my eyes as I did so, as some primordial deeply embedded subconscious fear overtook my mind.When I opened them again a mere second later, I was in a very different world. The first things that struck me were that it was night time on the other side of the fissure and that there was not an inch of fog to be seen.
I lowered the lantern that Morris had handed me as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, and was glad to see the deck of the Augustine still beneath my leaded boots. A thin layer of icy crystallised dew covered the deck as far as my lantern made out. Looking up I could see stars in the night sky above the ship.
I decided to move to the port rail to see what held the prow of the Augustine in this strange twilight world. I only got two steps before the lantern flickered three times and then went out. Dropping my air tubes I reached down and grabbed my torch from my belt and with great difficulty, because of my cumbersome gloves, switched it on.
I was shocked as the torch beam revealed a frost that was already starting to form upon the glass of the lantern and in that same instant I began to feel it through my suit and layered clothing.As the lantern was of no further use, I threw it over the nearby port rail. Then I stood amazed as the lantern kept spinning and turning in a straight line as it passed the rail. It continued onwards and outwards into the cold darkness, without ever showing any signs of falling.I moved my legs towards the port rail, keeping my torch beam on the gravity-defying lantern as it sailed out towards the stars and out of sight.
I made it to the icy rail and bent over as far as I could, my torch extended before me in my gloved hand. There I found a discovery, one of many to follow that shocked my beliefs to the very core.
Around the sides and surely underneath the keel of the prow of the Augustine was a vast waterfall of frozen seawater. The ice flow extended out ten feet at the side, and goodness knows how thick it was.
‘The sea has been frozen solid,’ I muttered to myself, and as I spoke, I noticed cold puffs of air rise up from my mouth inside my brass helmet. I was glad that the air coming from the other side of the fissure was coming through at body temperature now, as the pump got warmer the longer it was used.
Leaving the port rail. I headed forward towards the prow of the ship, to see if I could find any signs of Samson and the missing crew before I became too cold to move my limbs. I did not hold up much hope of finding them alive, as the cold dark world on this side of the fissure must have surely frozen them to death by now.
I hurried as best I could and became aware of a chattering sound. I soon realised it was only my own teeth. I had never felt such cold as this and knew I would have to traverse back through the world-dividing hole soon before I became a permanent ice sculpture here.
Reaching the end of the ship, where port and starboard rails converged into a v-shape, I became aware of a glow far off in the night.
This glow began to increase rapidly in a thin elliptical shape, and as the orange light increased and spread, it raced around to reveal a round far off object, so immense that I could not understand what I was seeing. Other round bodies became visible, yet no dawn arrived, only the spherical celestial masses which grew in number. The light crept on around the shapes until five great orbs could be seen of varying colours, shapes, distances and sizes.
‘My Lord God,’ I whispered, and had to wipe away the frost from the outside of my face-plate to see.
These shapes before me were stars and planets of a size and proximity that no-one had seen before. I had been at sea many times and had known a few astronomers during my Boston stay. These fellows would have given their right arms for just one glimpse of this alien constellation. The grey plant to my right was so vast only a quarter of its great bulk could I see. Blazing light from a sun covered by the incalculable mass of the grey world shone across the dark heavens to settle upon the central and most eye-catching planet. It was purple in hue with continents of mauve, peppered with swirling clouds of indigo. The freezing cold had penetrated deep into my bones now, and I knew I had to leave. Once suitably warmed, I could once more take the journey through the black veil of night into this other dimension of God’s creation.I was half turned to retrace my steps back to the safety of the fog-bound side of the Augustine when movement caught my eye.
Turning on legs that felt like they were aflame, but gripped by the cold, I saw tiny specks appear from the purple planet dead ahead and maybe thousands of miles away from me.I lost count as hundreds of these small things darted about, perhaps evidencing that they were individual creatures and not space rocks or comets. Thousands now zoomed across and around the planet like a shoal of fish. This seemed to me a very familiar movement. I had witnessed shoals of small fish before, and they were usually followed by larger denizens of the deep.It wasn’t long before something much larger arrived. Something more massive and beyond scale that could send a sane man mad just trying to calculate its enormity. From behind the large grey planet, yet many leagues distant from me, it came.
Larger than the planet of purple, it moved through the stars with great undulations of its grey leviathan body. It was twice the size of the purple planet and maybe ten times its length. If it had eyes, then I could not see them, yet it had a mouth of sorts, round, cavernous and filled with silver teeth, much like the lamprey fish of Earth’s seas.
Finally, the cold and the sight of this nightmare grey colossus of the stars, caused me to fall on my side, a shivering wreck of a man. I knew I should try and drag myself back to the other side of the Augustine and safety, but my body was already too weak, and my mind would not leave this place. With great effort and my last ounce of strength I wiped the frost from my face plate again and watched this creature, that surely was not of God’s creation, advance on the unsuspecting planet with its mouth wide open to consume it.I wondered vaguely if there was some form of human life on that world or other sentient beings that had evolved. Then I watched, for I could do little else, in morbid fascination as the great star beast brought its jaws to bear on the purple world and sundered almost half the world in two and swallowed half the planet half deep inside its odious body.
The rest of the purple world seemed to split asunder as its core exploded outwards, with a soundless explosion of light and debris.The great space Proteus seemed unaffected by this, but the gnat creatures that led the way like pilot fish were blown across the stars.My numb limbs gave way now, and I collapsed sideways onto the icy deck of the Augustine’s prow, which had travelled farther than any ship that had ever been built.
Then I remember being buffeted like an earthquake had hit the ship and something flew into my vision. I turned my neck so I could see through my right sided porthole. One of the gnat creatures had escaped the destruction of the purple star and was hovering above me on gossamer wings. The boat beneath me continued to be rocked by the shock waves of the destroyed world.
The creature clicked together two great pincers that were attached to its body, yet it had no head, eyes or nostrils, but somehow it sensed me. Its body was covered with tiny cilia which moved and waved as it hung above me. in the cold air. There were longer fronds waving from its sides, and flushes of colour played over its surface like those on a cuttlefish.
I wondered if hyperthermia or the creature would end my life first, as I lay there so far from home. The darkness took me.
I awoke to find myself in the sick bay of the Augustine; it was day, and the sunlight streamed through the nearby portholes. I could hear engines and movement, and I nearly whooped with joy: the ship was moving again and at full speed. With stiff arms and pains in my feet, I pulled myself up into a sitting position.
‘Doctor, he’s awake,’ came the sweet American tones of Olivia Valentine, sat with a blanket over her lap, in a chair by my bed.
‘Steady there, son, you’ve had quite a rough time of it of late,’ said the ship’s doctor as he hurried to my side to give me the once over. I reached out a bandaged hand from the bedcovers, and Olivia clasped it in her warm hands.
Charlie Chaplin,’ I said, and smiled.
‘Charlie Chaplin,’ she smiled back, tears of relief flooding down her enchanting cheeks.
‘Delirious, the both of them,’ the doctor muttered, putting his stethoscope to his ears and my chest.
‘We’ve broken free from the hole in space?’
‘Yes,’ she said and kissed my bandaged hand. ‘You saved us all, Christian.’
‘Did I?’ I asked. ‘The things I saw there, Olivia … No man will believe me!’
‘I’m no man, but I’m darn sure that they will.’
‘How can you be so sure? I’m not sure what I saw. It could have been hallucinations brought on by the freezing temperatures.’
‘Trust me, they will,’ she winked.
The next day, in a wheelchair used onboard for the more elderly and infirm passengers, Olivia and Morris wheeled me to the ship’s upper hold. The frostbite in my hands and feet had not been too bad, though I did lose two toes on my right foot. At the entrance to the hold were two crewmen armed with rifles. Inside were Captain West and First Officer Greenwood, both armed with revolvers. In an iron cage, surrounded by a circle of salt (which was Morris’s idea) was the gnat creature I had seen before the ship had been pushed back into normal space by the shockwaves of the exploding purple star.
I stared at its strange thin fronds and noted that its colouring was mostly grey now. Its large pincers clicked as it attacked the bars of its cage.
I wondered how far away in the heavens that strange sun and those planets had been.
As I staggered back out into the sunlight, I trembled inside. How long would the leviathan space Proteus take before it reached the Milky Way and our own planet Earth?