Mimozka: This one is for you.
Tia Dalma and Will have such an interesting relationship. Thank you for inspiring me to explore it!
Between the edges of space and time, where Up is Down, Dawn is Dusk, and the outer seas of eternity ring the inner, the Flying Dutchman glided on a violet, star strewn sea, as calm and still as a painted ship upon a painted ocean. Her dark wake gently tousling long, ebbing ripples and her billowed sails were the only signs of her progress through the glass smooth sea.
"Wilyam Turhner…" Her captain turned slowly at the helm. A dark woman stood beside him, her touch on his arm both cold and sudden.
"Tia Dalma." If he was surprised to see her, no trace of it showed on his composed face.
She smiled beguilingly. "Dat is not my nahme."
"Calypso." His dark eyes narrowed as the goddess' smile widened into a slow grin. "What is it that you want?"
"Yeh're cahled."
"Called to what?"
"Yehr duty." Both the grin and the smile were gone. "Yehr destiny."
He looked away over the vast, unending shroud of night covering the glassy, winking sea. "It is not my destiny." He sighed at last, still looking over the nonexistent horizon, tracing a jagged scar that covered his left breast. "It is a circumstance. And only mine save unhappy chance."
She smiled again, yet its warmth did not quite quell the sadness in her eyes. "Chance, yeh will find, Wilyam Turhner, like circumstance, be only as un'appy as yeh make dem."
His eyes pierced hers accusingly. "And what about you, Calypso? Have you made your circumstance happy?"
But that mysterious, maddening, all-knowing smile again creased her face, sparkling her squinting eyes, and she beckoned sensuously with one painted finger. "Come." And the Sea, the Stars, and the Ship spun and faded as time, space, distance and matter came tumbling upon them from another dimension.
Gently she glided upon the crystal surface, so slowly that mirrored above and below there were no ripples to tell which image was real and which was reflection. But locked away from this peace and stillness and eternal void, the heart of William Turner lay encased in a tomb of ebony wood, as unfeeling and unchanging as the surface of the water. All along the sides of the Dutchman her precious cargo stood, glancing over the gunnels at the star strewn waters, some pensive, some angry, some in wonder at the beauty that lay before them. From a white-haired man of seventy summers to a small child of seven, some wept, others cursed, and yet others remained silent, their eyes drinking the scene like living water.
But Will felt nothing. No pity, no rage, no bitterness, no beauty. Even here, at the edge of eternity, he felt no awe.
If he could but envy them, he would.
White water.
Its curls and twists of pallid splendor refreshing and new against the forever of calm, obsidian crystal surrounding the solitary ship. And then, a shore of pale, ethereal sand, stretching on into the endless horizon. Virgin sand, with no trace or stain of disturbance, as perfectly smooth and eerie as the violet waters that lay still and calm around the Flying Dutchman. The small waves and breakers continued to roll onto the shore, turning from dark to spirals of cloudy foam as they roared gently against and onto the pristine sand, where they glistened like tears.
"I do not recognize this place."
"Glasglow," His father's patient voice said lowly. "Don't you know it, son?"
"No." Will said. "There's nothing there."
"I see Glasglow." His father persisted lightly. "The cathedral, there." He pointed off into the horizon, towards a glowing galaxy that shimmered like the gleam of mother of pearl. Will squinted his eyes, following the strong arm and thick finger into the distance, and for a moment, the dim spire of a cathedral appeared, then city streets and stone buildings shaped faintly in the night time sky, solidifying, cementing, enfleshed. "Do you see it?" His father asked.
"Yes." Will said. "I see it."
"What do you suppose it means?" his father's voice interrupted his lonely vigil.
"I do not know."
"Aye." Bootstrap said. "Do I wake them?" Around them, the dead slumbered.
Will squinted again at the pristine shore stretching endlessly through the midnight sea. "Not yet."
His father remained by his side, and the ghost of Glasglow remained on the horizon, sickly starlight wavering through its ethereal liquidity. They stood there, silent, together, how long both unimportant and meaningless in a dimension where time and space, matter and reality had no meaning. Finally, after a moment—or was it an eternity?—his father laid a heavy hand on his arm, gripped it firmly once, and was gone.
On the horizon, Glasglow flickered, dying as a blown candle in a gust of wind.
The shore, the perfect shore, returned. Deep, dark, imprinted shadows slowly appeared, and Will watched them, their shadow lengthening longer and longer, deeper and more defined, until he realized they were footprints, a lone, single set of footprints wandering the abandoned shore of eternity. Then the ghostly figure of a mourning woman appeared, treading barefooted, slowly pacing her eternal vigil in the deepening midnight silence. Only the gentle lapping of the paling waves could be heard.
If only he had a heart, it would be weeping.
"What is it dat yeh see, Wilyam?" Calypso's honeyed voice whispered. "What is it dat yeh see?"
"A shore." Will said. "And a woman, walking." He watched her walk, her long, graceful strides, her head hung low, her wide eyes, her pressed lips, still staring anxiously at the sea, looking through him into the void. "She is alone."
"An' who is dat womahn, do yeh tink?"
"Elizabeth."
"An' wha' do yeh feel?"
"I?" Will whispered, his dark, emotionless eyes tearing from the spectral figure. "Nothing."
"Him carve out him heart tinking to be rid of de pain, Wilyam. An' whidge is worse, d'jeh tink? Ta feel dat pain, or ta long fer it wid all yehr soul?"
"Tia Dalma, what is this place?" He said. "I no longer have a heart-I cannot tell if it is paradise to see her…or purgatory."
"Fer some, it be him purgatory." She answered, a coldness biting in her words. But then her eyes softened, and one thin arm raised itself to trace a stained fingernail down his cheek, that mysterious smile stealing again across her inscrutable lips. " Bu' fer oters, it be him paradise."
"I do not understand." Beyond them, on the shore, the ghostly woman continued to pace, as evenly and unchangingly as the waves washing ashore, shimmering across the shadowed sand.
"No?" She asked, staring at the shadowy figure in turn. "Den wake dem."
"They must wake." Will found his father. "We are here."
The man looked at him questioningly, but bowed his head with a sad smile. "You're the captain." Together they gently roused the dead, a touch of a hand here, a small shake there, until the deck and cabins of the Flying Dutchman were again alive with movement and sound.
The gangplank was lowered, sinking into the soft white sand.
The Dutchman's passengers huddled together, whispering, wondering, waiting.
But only silence greeted them. Will, for his part, said nothing.
Finally, a young woman stepped forward, staring off towards the haunting shore.
"Where are we?' The pale-haired woman asked him, cradling a stirring infant against her bosom.
"Here." Calypso answered cryptically.
"And where do we go?" She questioned again.
But that small smile was her only answer. "On."
The woman raised her anxious eyes to Will, but his gaze was just as inscrutable.
"It be Ireland." She finally said. "I see me mam."
The shadow of the walking woman disappeared. On the shore, green hills and a small homestead with curling grey smoke rising from a brick chimney came faint and flickering, a grey haired woman with a hoe in one hand, the other outstretched, welcoming, her face and those same anxious, blue eyes raised to them.
Then a man, with red hair and a red beard, appeared behind her.
"Patty!" The woman shrieked in delight, "Oh, Patty!" She began to run.
"No!" A terrible, grating screech rose from the crowd. "Are ye blind? Lass, there be no shore!"
The green hills of Ireland disappeared, and even the twinkling stars and the pale sands were swallowed up into darkness and damp, an eternal blackness of inky sea, of terrifying nothingness…
But the Irish woman paid no heed to his cries or to the sudden apparition. Her dainty feet clamoured down the slippery wood, her sobs of laughter and tears as she ran to her husband and mother echoing in the void.
There were other shouts of dismay, cries of woe. Licking, angry flames appeared, serpentine and cruel. Cold glaciers of blue ice and frigid winds. A host of dancing, cackling demons, their clawed and twisted hands holding instruments of torture and pain, smoke and ash issuing from their raw, reddening mouths, their eyes ravished and hungry for blood…
"Dis no be Ireland." A deep, strong voice spoke calmly and reassuringly as the smoke and chaos of the demons faded like smoke in a breeze. "Dis be our home." The tall Nubian spoke commandingly from the top of the gangplank. "You come." A host of dark skinned, skeletal slaves followed, their limbs becoming supple, the scars of their manacles healing, their flesh becoming whole and clean. Chains opened and fell clattering with finality onto the parched sands of the wavering African shore.
"I don't understand." Will said.
"No?" Calypso asked sadly. "De don' see it, Wilyam. De only see de one ting."
"Maman!" a child called. "Maman!" She raced across the shore into the embrace of a provincial French peasant woman, tears streaming down her face.
"No! NO!" The demons flickered about a man dressed in the rags of a British Naval uniform, driving him to madness as he fell over the side of the ship, a shriveled skeleton in an ocean of ash and decay.
"To each," She said, placing a hand on a gilt ebony music box between her breasts, "him own." A ragged sailor appeared on the shoreline, in a ship mired atop a mountain. All around, the water turned to hills and vales and grass and trees. The ocean, all over eternity, had dried into land, the Dutchman floating, suspended only by the wind.
"Damn you!" The sailor's shouts of rage and betrayal resounded through the still air. "You never loved me!"
Long, stained nails wrenched rough cord from around her neck, tearing off thick braids of hair in their haste. A lone, angry tear trickled down her dark face, as her lean, supple arms wrest back and hurled the heart-shaped torment from her chest. It hit the sand and shattered with the stroke of a thousand golden bells and keys, the wooden case splintering into dust and the metals rusting, corroding, disappearing. The salty cord rotted, slithered, vanished.
"No, Davey Jones." Calypso jeered, barring her teeth in a cruel, leering smile. "I was always love you." The land disappeared in a crash of foam and spray, an ocean as still and calm, yet bleaker and blank, devoid of cloud, star, and wind appeared, waveless and flat in all directions. "Take dis sea dat yeh love."
"Calypso! Calypso!"The keening cries disappeared in an echoing scream of thunder and a sob of rushing wind. The sails groaned once, and an ice cold breaker washed over even the decks of the Dutchman herself.
Than a soft, salty rain, as gentle and grey as tears, began to fall.
Alone again. His charges had scattered and disappeared in the weird and haunted shores at World's End. Some laughing with loved ones in their paradise, others gnashing their teeth and shrieking in their solitary purgatory until that day the trumpet would call and the Sea would finally, resentfully, give up her dead. But these spectral visions vanished slowly, finally, until only one remained: a pale, perfect shore, crisp and white like a virgin snow.
The Dutchman sailed alongside through a still, violet sea, gently stirring the star strewn waters in its lonely wake. And on the starlit shore, a wasting woman still walking, waiting, eternally alone…
Will awoke from this dark reverie when a gentle hand lay itself upon his arm-a hand he once remembered shaking him from sleep as a child in what seemed like an age ago. He looked up to find his father's face awash with tears.
"Ten years, son." Bootstrap choked, looking to the shore where Elizabeth Turner stood, wan and sad. For once she remained, growing solid and fleshed instead of evanescent. "It may feel like an eternity…but you must understand it is not."
And in another dimension, on a down mattress, under an embroidered silken comforter, nestled in the arms of a sleeping woman, pressed close to her breast where every beat could be heard and felt, locked away in its ebony tomb, the heart of William Turner bled silent tears.