Chapter 4
"He's a bit trying" George said to Julia "now that he is in the middle of a religious crisis."
"He'll get over it. And he's entitled to act a bit silly."
"And I am the one who has to put up with it."
"It will get better. The novelty of it will wear off and he will settle back into a routine."
"Why should it affect him this way?"
"It is no small matter for him. Suddenly his image of himself has been turned upside down. He was not very religious back in the seventeen century, probably from learning religion from his aunt Abigail and others like her. Then he was barred from it, and when he could no longer have it, he began to appreciate what it was that he had overlooked. Now, he can go back and try to make the most of it. But in which way I cannot tell."
"Is religion that great a need, then?"
"Yes." Julia said. "You are young and strong, so you think that you don't need it. But you do."
"I guess that for too long I pictured God as a larger, nastier version of my father. Hard to feel any warmth towards someone like that. Then there was Dave, and all religion could tell me what that he and I were damned for what we did together."
"I know. It is hard to love God when the ones who exhort us to it are downright abominable in our eyes. Yet we did call on those we loved. As Trask said, if we had been Catholics, we'd have called upon saints. That's why they have saints, really. They need to talk to someone is more approachable, more understanding than God.
"Some saints. Naomi was a suicide. Sam Evans was a drunk. Dave was a homosexual..."
"Yet they did the job."
"Yes... I guess there are mysteries in this world, still."
Maybe he should not have spoken to Carolyn that way, Adam thought. She had received a shock and she needed someone to blame it on.
But why should she blame him? Was he a dumping ground for Carolyn's frustrations?
Even if they made up, and tried again, what then? She' probably blame him for something else and let him know how disappointed she was in him...
No. He had to face it. There was nothing for him in Collinwood. Carolyn had her little circle of Roger and Edmund, and in the end, they were the ones that mattered.
He... he was just stud service...
He looked at the paintings. He was trying to recreate the place of the boulders, with her in the middle, making her real, making he alive for him, while he was still in dry land...
Derek looked at the family photos that Xavier and Sandy were showing to him. They certainly had several interesting relatives.
"A bunch of bullheaded people, that's what most of them were." Xavier said "And I got plenty of stories to tell. Look at this one. She was with a traveling medicine show in the West. Well, it was not actually a medicine show, it was a lecturer for a rather lunatic brand of medicine, though I must say that the man had a lot of sensible ideas when it came to food. My relative used to write long letters telling the rest of the family what she had seen and done... I still keep them. Maybe I should let some historian take a look."
Sandy showed her own peculiar relatives and Derek laughed good humouredly at them.
He felt good being with them. It was the closes that he had to a family, he had been without one for too long... They had sort of adopted him after he had helped save Xavier's life, and he was surprised how much he enjoyed it.
Phillip walked on the beach. It was cold and snowy. It was uncomfortable, yet he liked it. Maybe it was that when it was cold, now he could go indoors instead of just swimming with no relief in sight.
He did not remember much of his time as a fish. And he did not like to remember it. If that, at least, Burke Devlin had been kind. He had removed his consciousness of what was happening as he doomed him to the waves...
Well, Burke Devlin was dead. he would not be back. And he was alive, and back with Vicky, watching his son grow up. It was only a bad memory now, each day pushing that memory further and further away...
He looked at the sea, now empty of terrors for him ands aw a speck bobbing up and down the waves.
It was a man. Swimming out there in the cold.
Now it came closer to him, and Phillip thought that he recognized the lunatic. Probably Xavier. He was the one who did things lie this.
He saw the clothes down on the beach. He frowned. These were not Xavier's clothes, not as he remembered them. And Xavier would come out in a bathing suit and robe, not fully clothed.
The man came even closer, and he knew that it was not Xavier.
It was Adam.
"Hey!" Phillip said with surprise "What are you doing here? You'll catch your death of cold."
And then it was the fear. It was starting again. The sea was rising again to swallow up men. Just as when Burke Devlin...
"Don't" he shouted at Adam. "Don't go away to the sea! It will devour you! Come back! Don't!"
Something caught his foot. He stumbled and fell. His head hit the ground and he passed out.
He came to hours later. His head hurt, and his chest hurt. He had caught cold lying there on the sand.
He had fallen down, he knew. He had stumbled. he had not been watching where he was going. He had been watching something else...
But he could not recall what. He tried thinking about it and all he could recall were waves rising and breaking with monotonous regularity on the beach.. Nothing more.
There was something else. Something that he should remember, that he should tell others about.
"So you came to." Adam aid.
"You..." Phillip said. "I saw you."
"Yes, you did." Adam extended his hand and Phillip saw the green braided bracelet that Adam wore. Adam put a hand on Phillip's forehead. "But you will not remember any of it. It was an accident. You stumbled and fell, as you were watching the gulls, nothing remarkable about it. You were lucky that I came along."
"You were not walking." Phillip struggled to get the hand away from his forehead., where it was beginning to cut him like a knife. "I saw your clothes. You were naked when you went swimming."
"You saw no clothes. You saw no one. You only saw waves and seagulls. And you did not watch where you were walking."
"No..No..It was not that way. Listen to me, Adam. Don't go there. You can't trust the sea. It is cruel. Nothing but razor sharp teeth that grab you and swallow you whole. Don't go to it. Don't...:"
But he could not fight it. He could not move his limbs, and a grey fog began to form behind his eyes, filling his mouth and nostrils, making him sleep and forget.
"Poor Phillip" Barnabas commiserated. "You don't seem to run out of bad luck."
"It is nothing." Phillip said cheerfully "Just a dumb accident. A superficial cut and a couple of days of rest,."
"But you could have died out there, all alone."
"But I didn't. Adam found me, and here I am. It will teach me to be more careful in the future."
"Still, you do have bad luck. I lost count of how many times I have been by your bedside. When it is not one thing, it is another."
"Maybe. But this one is normal enough. Burke Devlin had nothing to do with this one."
"No, he didn't. But still..."
"Still, nothing. Don't look so glum. It is not your failure, after all."