Now:
"Sir—could you come take a look at this?"
"What is it, Abernathy?
"That," Abernathy said, handing his captain a pair of binoculars. "Over there. There's a column of smoke rising, see?"
"So?"
"So according to our charts, that's open sea. We thought it might signal a vessel in distress."
"Have you picked up anything on the radio?"
"No, sir."
The captain thought for a moment. "Divert our course. We'll investigate the smoke; even if it's nothing, it shouldn't take us too far out of our way."
OoOoOoO
Grunting a bit with the effort, the ginger-haired woman heaved another log on the signal fire, and sighed in exasperation. The woodpile was running low again. She was just debating with herself as to whether there was enough left to last until tending the fire was someone else's job—she was pretty sure that there wasn't, but was hoping that she could convince herself that she was wrong—when she spotted the ship on the horizon. Overjoyed, she seized one of the conch shells they kept handy and blew it in the pattern the Skipper had taught them all; three short blasts, three longer ones, three more short ones. Stopping for breath, she threw on another log—no sense in skimping on the firewood now—and repeated the distress call.
The others appeared from every corner of the island, shouting and waving as they ran for the beach, and one by one they fell silent in awed gratitude as the ship drew closer, and closer still.
"We're rescued," someone breathed.
OoOoOoO
"They said they were marooned there a few months back. The big guy, he ran a pleasure craft doing chartered tours. But they got blown way off course in a storm, and the boat was wrecked."
"Checks out," said Chen, coming in with a scrap of paper in his hand. "I radioed the Coast Guard; they knew all about the missing ship, and these folks match the descriptions of the ones who were aboard. Well, mostly."
"Mostly?"
"They're one short."
OoOoOoO
Six sorrier looking scarecrows he'd never seen, thought the crewman who'd been assigned to look after their unexpected guests. Thin in a way that spoke of near-starvation, and the men all had beards you could have used to smuggle small animals, and their clothes were worn to rags. Their faces were prematurely aged; hollow-eyed, weatherbeaten, sunburnt, windburnt, pained. The smell of them was, to put it mildly, unbelievable. It must have been sheer hell for them, poor sods. He climbed nimbly from the inflatable dinghy they'd used to ferry their new friends to safety, and held out a hand to help the first of them aboard.
"So, welcome to the New Moon," he said awkwardly once they were all gathered on the deck. "We're a cargo ship; we're en route to New Zealand."
"New Zealand! That would take weeks!" The big man, still wearing the tattered remains of a blue yachtsman's cap, sounded aghast.
"Oh, you're not coming all that way," he said quickly. "We're going to rendezvous with the Coast Guard. They'll bring you back to civilization, probably in a day or two. In the meantime… um… we can bring you folks to the crew quarters, and you can clean up a little, and get some rest. You've been through a terrible ordeal."
Then:
"This isn't going to be easy," the Skipper had said. "We're all going to have to pitch in if we expect to survive. But we're all in this together."
He'd said that a lot in the weeks since the shipwreck. We're all in this together. It was true. They had no real resources except one another, which meant, the Skipper thought grimly, that they had no real resources. The island was little more than a spit of coral and sand, a narrow tongue of dry land in the middle of a very unwelcoming sea.
There was some plant life; bamboo thickets, a palm tree here and there, straggly underbrush of some indeterminate species. No animals, at least not so far. In a sense, that was almost lucky, since the wretched lean-tos they'd managed to cobble together (bamboo and palm fronds, lashed together with grass and about as sturdy as one might have expected from the description,) were barely enough to shield them from the worst of the rain, and would have been useless against marauding beasts of any description.
Speaking of the rain, that was unquestionably lucky. There was a lot of it, and the Skipper's rain slicker, (and thank God he hadn't discarded it when the boat cracked up and they'd all ended up in the drink,) with the sleeves tied off and loosely suspended from four poles, was usually at least half-full after each shower. It meant that each of them could usually count on receiving an almost adequate water ration; they hadn't yet found another reliable source of fresh water.
But where their luck really ran out was the question of food. There just plain wasn't enough. The few palm trees grudgingly produced a coconut or two, and they caught the occasional fish or sea bird, but starvation was breathing down their necks. The Skipper, who had been living in the tropics for some five or six years by then, was now cursing himself for not becoming more familiar with the native foods. He thought he remembered that taro grew wild all through these islands, but he also thought he remembered that you had to do something to it before it was safe to eat—boil out the poison or something—and besides, he didn't know what the plant looked like when it was still in the ground. He'd never seen it anywhere besides a restaurant. And some seaweeds were edible… but which ones?
His sole crewman, a puppyish young man with more enthusiasm than sense, was even less knowledgeable. Native cuisine, as a whole, let alone the indigenous plant life, was a closed book to him; he was a Pennsylvania boy, and had been living in the islands for less than a year. The only meals he knew how to make, he had said with a sunny smile, were condensed soup out of a can and peanut butter sandwiches. And seeing as how they didn't have any bread, peanut butter, canned soup, or, for that matter, a can opener, he was afraid that he wasn't going to be much of a help on that front.
"Canned soup and peanut butter sandwiches?" The farmgirl made a face. "Is that all you eat?"
He'd winked at her, and said, with a sly, sidelong glance at the captain, "Heck, with what he pays me, that's all I can afford!"
It had gotten a wan chuckle out of the others, which had actually been his main goal in saying it in the first place, but the underlying problem—the barrenness of the island—was no laughing matter.
He'd had some luck hunting for oysters and mussels in the previous couple of days, and, encouraged, had made a crude trowel out of a chunk of bamboo to help him in his search for more. Shellfish didn't move around much, which made catching them a bit more reliable than the rod-and-reel fishing he'd initially tried. Not even rod-and-reel; more like stick-and-vine, and the fish were not impressed. Since they didn't have much of a way in which to cook the mussels, et al, when he did find them, it was rather a lot of work for the very ambiguous reward of a couple of mouthfuls of slime apiece, but there was an old saw about beggars and choosers that sprang to mind. The socialite had been less than encouraging about the oysters; she had trilled something about how one oughtn't to eat them in months that did not contain the letter 'R.'
The schoolteacher had made some curt remarks to the effect that if she didn't want them, he would be more than happy to eat her share, and the subject had been closed. Anyhow, if it came down to death via slow starvation as opposed to food poisoning, they both had their pros and cons. Dealer's choice.
Later:
No one could have expected the school to hold his position open, the scientist told himself. After all, who could have foreseen his survival, his return from the realm of Davy Jones? It was understandable, even, that his former employers did not really see a way to dismiss the teacher they had hired in his stead—good man, good teacher, his students were doing well, and it would be unfair to expect them to change horses midstream—and could not promise him his position back. Completely logical. Entirely reasonable.
And when a glass or two to help him fall asleep in the evenings slowly grew to engulf whole days, as he feverishly spent his suddenly empty hours writing an account of their experiences that grew less and less coherent by the page, if not the paragraph, a new job receded into the distance. Further and further into the distance. And slowly, everything else— everything but the blessed oblivion at the bottom of the bottle, that is— did too.
Then:
The Skipper tied off the last of the vines. The rickety bamboo platform was scarcely big enough for what it needed to carry, but it would do well enough.
We'll bury him at sea, he had decided. Nice and respectful.
With the Professor's help, he had constructed this flimsy raft. The remains had been placed onboard and covered over with enough kindling and dry twigs that the whole thing should go up like the Fourth of July. He waded out into the lagoon up to his waist, dragging the raft with its somber cargo behind him.
A female voice cried out, "Wait!" Surprised, he turned around. All of the others, looking understandably miserable, emerged from the jungle, and approached the edge of the water. They were holding flowers.
"We… well, we wanted to pay our respects," faltered the farmgirl. She waded out to where he was standing, and placed the hibiscus she was carrying on the edge of the raft.
One by one, the others did the same, looking to the sky, or at their hands; anywhere but at each other, or at the funeral barge.
The Skipper nodded briefly to the financier, who handed him a lit torch. Carefully, the Skipper held the flame to the kindling, and when it had caught, he used a pole to shove the raft into the current. It carried the small raft—now a small column of flame—away from the shore, away from the castaways, and when the blaze was so far out that it was almost too small to see, it abruptly winked out as the raft was consumed, and dropped its sad burden to the ocean floor deep below.
Later:
The farmgirl went home, back to the chores and the well-loved faces and the grain fields that stretched as far as the eye could see. She went home, far from the ocean with its dangers and its secrets and its memories. She went home, to a weathered farmhouse and the quiet routine and the comfortable familiarity of the scenes she had known all her life.
She didn't care to talk about her ordeal, of course. She just smiled sweetly whenever the subject came up, saying how glad she was to be back where she belonged, and saved her tears for silent midnights and stifling pillows. But it didn't take long for her family and the neighbors who were like family to realize that the greater part of her was gone, snuffed out like a candle.
She stopped leaving the house, even for church or chores. Then she stopped leaving her room. Then she stopped speaking entirely. Stopped reacting when spoken to. Death would have been kinder.
Then:
The farmgirl and the starlet had been allotted a lean-to of their own in deference to their youth and femininity. Both thought that the assumption that either of them had much in the way of modesty left to preserve was rather funny; the light sundresses both had been wearing on the ill-fated tour had not fared well in the weeks since the wreck. The actress had been somewhat bitter about their newly shortened, ragged skirts; the last time she'd shown this much leg, she'd said acidly, she'd gotten a speaking role in a movie.
The farmgirl thought privately that if she had ever shown this much leg back home, the only thing she'd have gotten would have been a reputation. But, then again, everyone knew that Hollywood and the denizens thereof were known more for their glamour than their morality. So she kept her opinions to herself, both as regarded their increasingly tattered and threadbare clothing, and as to her companion's habit of occasionally vanishing into the jungle with one or another of the male castaways. They never seemed to come back from those little outings with any coconuts.
OoOoOoO
"Hey, Skipper," called the sailor. "I found some, look!" His shirt was tied into a lumpy bundle around the shellfish. "Three apiece. You can take first pick, since you're the captain."
The Skipper tried to smile. "Thanks. Good work. But we're going to need more than that, you know. My shirt's so loose, I could fit another person in here with me."
"Aw, Skipper, c'mon. I've seen that shirt of yours—you could always have fit two people into there. If you weren't wearing it, we could've used it for a tent."
"Wise guy. Don't make me have to teach you some manners, all right?"
The kid smirked. "Who better? Table manners, at least; I'll bet you're real good with those."
The Skipper chuckled in spite of himself. The kid had a gift. "One of these days your mouth's going to get you in real trouble, you know that?"
"Well, it won't be today. Go on, pick your oysters; I've got to get the others their share. Maybe you'll find a pearl."
"It's just not enough," the Skipper repeated. "We've got to figure something out, and fast."
"Yeah, I know," he sighed. "I've been thinking. Maybe we can braid some vines into a net and catch fish that way? Don't tell the others, but those fishhooks we made out of bone just aren't working. Half the time they break, and the rest of the time the fish just ignore them."
The Skipper nodded. "Try it; if it doesn't work, we're no worse off than we are now."
It didn't work all that well, in fact. As the days dragged on, as semi-starvation set in, as hopes faded, the seven of them began sinking deeper and deeper into a numb stupor. They took it in turns to tend the signal fire, which doubled as their kitchen when they had anything to cook and kept them somewhat warm at night. It was gradually becoming less and less a signal, less and less a way of reaching out to the rest of the world. The rest of the world was fading; hope was fading. It was just a fire, most of the time. A source of light, of warmth. Occasionally food. If they hoped for much of anything, anymore, it was that.
Now:
He'd nearly forgotten how glorious a truly hot shower felt, the Skipper thought, toweling himself dry. Someone had left some clean clothing and toiletries in the bunkroom for him, and he redressed himself, noting, as a matter of only vague interest, that he was several pants sizes smaller than he'd been in decades. He shaved off the Old-Testament-Patriarch beard, too, and threw the tangled gray strands violently into the trash.
The others, also cleaned, freshly shaved, and dressed in a motley assortment of whatever clothing their rescuers had to spare, were in the mess. He joined them.
"They said we're going to be back home by tomorrow night," said the scientist. So we'd best get our stories straight, he didn't say aloud.
"I'll be glad to get home," said the Skipper. He had no boat, anymore, which meant no business and no income, but he was fairly sure he could finagle a job on one of the many other charter vessels. He hoped he was right to be fairly sure of it.
"I think we all are," said the actress. "Perhaps they'll make a movie about our little adventure. Like the Swiss Family Crusoe, or whatever it was called."
"Those are two different books," muttered the socialite. Twit, she didn't say.
"Who cares? Any director would leap at the idea. Our story has everything—adventure, with the seven of us all working together to survive in the face of overwhelming odds. Drama, suspense, maybe a bit of romance…"
"Tragedy," added the farmgirl softly.
Later:
The movie was an ill-fated venture from the start. The screenwriters were fired so rapidly, one after the next, that the resulting script, a patchwork of a dozen different hacks telling a dozen different versions of the story, was almost as incomprehensible as it was boring. And the actress herself, who had been laboring under the impression that she would star in her own story, was disabused of the notion as gently as possible.
The project was shelved after she was found one morning with an empty bottle of pills in her ice-cold hand. The footage of the few scenes already in the can, as well as all existing copies of the screenplay, were quietly destroyed in a clumsy but sincere gesture of respect. It would have been an expensive nightmare to film, anyway, the producers said privately, and had looked to be a flop of epic proportions, to boot. Better all around to forget the entire matter.
Then:
"At the rate we're all losing our strength, we're not going to survive for much longer. Perhaps another week or two," said the scientist, poking at the fire. The sailor had—miraculously—caught a fish, but had not remained with the others after wolfing down the scant few bites that had been his share. He'd gone back to the beach, hoping for more.
"I know," said the Skipper. They all knew. They were losing weight at a geometric rate, and he knew enough to recognize that his loosening teeth meant scurvy.
The farmgirl looked out at the sea. She wished she had the wherewithal for tears. If you couldn't cry at your own funeral, when could you? But it hadn't rained much today, and she had no moisture left. She was exhausted, listless, with no energy to waste… and she was so tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop that it was almost a relief that it finally had.
"We just need to eat," said the financier, and reached for his wife's hand. "We'll find something, and even if we don't, we're sure to be rescued soon. We're not going to die here," he said fiercely.
The actress cleared her throat. "I was in a movie once… it was based on a book by Edgar Allen Poe. There was a scene where the shipwrecked sailors, well… they drew lots to decide…"
"The Custom of the Sea," the Skipper muttered.
The schoolteacher's eyes widened. "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Good God! You can't be suggesting…"
"What? I do hate it when people are being cryptic and mysterious," said the socialite sharply.
The Skipper told her.
Later:
The financier and his wife returned home to an empire in shambles. The market had proved less than amenable to the manipulations of the idiot nephew who had been their primary heir, who, it seemed, was not nearly as brilliant a businessman as he thought he was. Several key assets had been liquidated at fire-sale prices, and the cash had been, in its turn, liquidated once again at what were apparently the most extravagantly excessive parties since the days of the Caesars.
The socialite never really seemed the same after their rescue; whether, as her detractors sniggered, it was due to the loss of their fortune, or simply, and more charitably, the rigors of their experience, was in the final analysis, a moot point. She just… faded, and when she failed to wake up one morning, she looked more at peace than she had since the initial shipwreck. Bereft of anything else, the financier threw himself into the job of rebuilding his empire with the drive and the intensity of a much younger man, but the fact remained that he was not, in any sense of the word, a young man, and neither his grief, his frustration, nor his sojourn in a tropical hell could be said to have improved his stamina or his health. The heart attack that felled him should not have been a surprise.
Now:
"He was very brave," said the actress firmly, blinking back tears, and smiled at the Coast Guard officer. "He was always doing his best to take care of us. I'll never forget him."
"What exactly happened?"
"Plain bad luck, I suppose," the Skipper said. "He was a skinny little guy even before the wreck. Not much stamina, and all the running around that damned island got to be too much, I guess. He was the best forager of any of us, always on the hunt for anything that could keep us alive for another day, but it was a lot of work."
"It's true. We'd have starved without him," said the financier, and traded a complicated glance with his wife.
"I know he wasn't taking anything like a full share of food or water," the farmgirl chimed in, and the guilt on her face was palpable. "He gave me extras a couple of times. I didn't think about it at the time, but it must have been from his ration."
"Me too," the actress confessed. The others, their faces painted in various shades of dismay, guilt and shame, nodded agreement.
"Anyhow, he died, not that long before we were rescued. I wish… I wish it had been otherwise," said the teacher, and looked away.
The officer shook his head. "I'm very sorry for your loss," he said sincerely. "It must have been terrible."
The Skipper sighed. "Yes. Good word for it. More terrible than you could ever imagine," he said.
Later:
The Skipper had seen his passengers safely back to shore. That, he thought, was something of which he could be at least a little proud. They had taken five souls out to sea, promising them adventure and a story to tell back home, but something else as well. We are men of the sea. We know our ship; we know these waters. You are safe with us. It might not have said that on the sign, but it was there, nonetheless; the implicit promise of safety and protection.
And now he was alone, watching the waves break on the shore. He had kept his promise to his passengers. He could not say the same for his promise to his crew—I am your captain. You will follow my orders, and I will keep you safe. That promise had not, in any sense of the word, been kept. He had, however, done the best he could in an impossible situation. His failure was not entirely his own fault. No one could say that he had not tried his best.
Who did he think he was fooling?
With no fanfare, the Skipper walked into the surf, appreciating the way the waves lapped at his skin—eager, enthusiastic, boundlessly energetic. Just like a boy he had once known. He waded through the warm tropical water until it was waist-deep, chest deep. Swam out a few lengths beyond the waves, then a few more, and then a bit further still.
His body was all but unrecognizable by the time it was discovered; waterlogged and strange, nibbled by the fish and the little crabs, but it was discovered, washed ashore and rejected, as though even the ocean wanted no part of him.
Then:
The sailor reappeared on the beach late that afternoon, emptyhanded but for an armload of driftwood. "There," he said, dumping it in a pile. "That should keep it going for a while. I think the fish have all gone on vacation, Skipper. Should I go look for seagulls, or can you think of something better? We're bound to catch something today."
The Skipper picked up a couple of good-sized boughs, threw one on the fire. He looked around at the other castaways, a question in his eyes.
They had each picked up a stick or a stone, and had formed a loose horseshoe shape around the two men. Yes.
"No, nothing comes to mind. That sounds fine," the Skipper told his crewman. "I'm sure we'll catch… something. In fact—look! What's that?" He pointed out to sea, and his hand only shook a little.
The sailor turned to follow the captain's pointing finger, and he squinted. "Gee, Skipper, I don't see—"
We're all in this together. He'd said it a thousand times. He'd meant it a thousand times. It had been true nine hundred and ninety nine of them. Six desperate people had made a decision. There had been no caveats, no hedging, no hesitation. They had weighed their options and made their choice.
Nonetheless, he's the Skipper; he's the one in charge, and that means the responsibility and the blame are unquestionably his. And he's the one who struck first, swinging the makeshift club in a violent arc that sent the young man sprawling.
One by one, each of the others did the same. The financier and his wife struck in rapid succession, one from either side; the Skipper thought he could actually hear the boy's ribs crack. Groggily, half-stunned, their prey tried to struggle to his feet, tried to escape, but a vicious stroke from the actress knocked him to his knees, and the impact of the farmgirl's rock sent him back to the sand.
The scientist finished the job with a heavy blow to the back of the head, putting the man out of his pain. And for a moment, the body cooling at their feet, they all looked at one another, at the blood splattering their wan faces and staining their hands. It had been necessary, they told themselves. The arithmetic of survival had not allowed for any different answer. For all the good that did.
The Skipper took a deep breath. "I'll cut it up," he said bluntly, hunkering down by their kill and drawing his knife. "You girls can start getting ready to cook it. We're all in this together. You two," he said, gesturing at the businessman and his wife. His voice was flat, unemotional in the way of someone who is hanging on to his control with his teeth and toenails. "You go build up the fire. Get more wood if we need it. Professor, you can give me a hand here; we've got work to do."
Silently, the scientist knelt beside him and reached for a knife. He'd dissected scores of animals over the course of his education, and had walked his own students through the process dozens of times. He made a careful, Y-shaped incision, and pretended that he was in a sterile laboratory, and that the body in front of him was nothing more than another specimen to be studied. It didn't help much.
All the castaways set about their grim tasks as quickly as they could. The Skipper especially; he hacked flesh from bone with a controlled fury, clinging desperately to the hope that it would all be easier once the carcass no longer looked like a person. Like a person he had known, had liked, had lived with. Like a person who had shared his struggle for survival, had trusted him. It would be an exaggeration to say it was easier, but once the girls had taken the pieces he handed them, once they had roasted the anonymous chunks over their signal fire, the cooked meat smelled and tasted like pork, and the starving men and women fell on it like the savage animals they knew they had become.
And afterwards, their hunger completely sated for the first time since the wreck, they retrieved what had been left behind—the ragged clothing, the offal, the bones, the caved-in skull—and gathered it all up in a neat bundle.
"Should we… do you think we should bury it?" asked the farmgirl, looking at the bloodstained sack with an unreadable expression.
The teacher thought that they'd do better to utilize the corpse in its entirety. The meal had cost one man his life and six others their souls; given that price, wasting any of it seemed almost as much of a crime as the original murder. Several organs were edible if sufficiently cleaned, and the bones could be split to retrieve the marrow, all of which would serve to keep them alive for at least a few days longer.
He also thought that it was amazing how the human mind adapted to horrors and protected itself. They had all made the mental leap that reduced a man from a 'him' to an 'it' in the space of an hour. They had committed murder and cannibalism on the strength of that mental reclassification, and he himself had become the sort of man who could cold-bloodedly justify all of it.
The Skipper looked at the sack, too. "Get a few more rocks to weight it all down," he said. "I'll make a little raft; we'll bury him at sea. Nice and respectful."
Out of sight, out of mind. Hiding the evidence. Washing their hands like Pilate, like Lady Macbeth. The bloody package on its flower-decked platform sank beneath the waves without leaving as much as a ripple to mark its disappearance.
OoOoOoO
The New Moon had appeared on the horizon less than two full days later.
OoOoOoO
Later still:
The Professor closed the book. The psychological study of the survivors of that ill-fated cruise to Melanesia had been a fascinating, if unconvincing, piece of scientific literature. Island madness, the author had called it; he had concluded that the savage conditions they had endured had, inexorably, led to their descent into savagery, and to their eventual destruction. That Lord of the Flies was, in the final analysis, an only slightly fictionalized description of the inevitable outcome of isolation and extreme stress on the human psyche.
The Professor didn't believe it for a moment. There were too many examples in history of small groups overcoming extreme odds and enforced isolation. For every Donner Party, there were any number of Pearys or Shackletons; the human spirit was simply not so easily degraded as all that. This study was scarcely more than a sensationalist penny-dreadful, hackwork at best, a ghoulish campfire story garnished with solemn pseudoscience and breathless pronouncements of doom. In the final analysis, it was, to coin a phrase, utter nonsense. He threw the treatise contemptuously onto the nightstand and picked up his valise, which contained the rest of his vacation reading and a few articles of clothing, and left the hotel.
He had all but forgotten the book as he walked to the marina, lost in pleasant anticipation of the island cruise he had planned for his afternoon, and musing on the tropical plants which he was sure would form a large part of the book he intended to write.
He remembered it later, but that was another story altogether.
OoOoOoO
Author's note: This is my answer to all the stupid jokes about how much better off the castaways would have been if they had simply eaten Gilligan. The shipwrecked tourists in Melanesia who 'destroyed one another' are mentioned by the Professor in the episode 'Ship Ahoax,' but with no specific details of their presumably grim fate. The conch from the rescue scene is a shout-out to the one used as an emblem of civilization from 'Lord of the Flies.' The title is taken from Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' another cheerful tale of disaster and misery on the high seas.
But oh! more horrible than that/
Is the curse in a dead man's eye!
Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,/
And yet I could not die.