Chapter Text
If you had been a geography student at the University of Amsterdam in 1983, then you certainly would not have been unfamiliar with the matter that caused an uproar across campus at the time: Doctor Verstappen, who had vanished in Boston nearly twenty years earlier, had been found in the Alps, and had returned alive — still as young as he had been before.
Without question, it had been the hottest news of the year. Students were all discussing whether he was a ghost or some other kind of creature.
Dr.Verstappen had in fact been discovered by a shepherd. One of the latter’s favorite black-nosed sheep had strayed from its usual route, ignoring the food around it as if something were calling to it, and to it alone. They passed through a vast stretch of forest, and finally, beside a stream, found Verstappen lying face down, looking as though he was about to fall into the water. His clothing was outdated, even ragged. At first, the shepherd thought he was a hiker who had run into trouble while traveling alone.
Only when his sheep began chewing on the man’s clothes did he hurry forward.
It was not until then that the shepherd realized Verstappen was still alive. It took him a great deal of effort and thought to successfully move Verstappen to the roadside, and then he waited a long while before a kind truck driver finally carried them both into town. Verstappen did not wake during the entire journey. If not for the faint rise and fall of his chest, neither the shepherd nor the truck driver would have thought to save him and bring him along.
The emergency room staff also failed to determine why he had fallen unconscious. For much of the time, they were more astonished by the identification found on Verstappen. His passport had expired. The photograph on it could just barely be recognized as him, but what shocked them most was the recorded date of birth. He had been born in the Netherlands before the war; by rights, he should already have entered old age. Yet his face showed no sign of change at all.
Was this truly him? Or had someone taken over his identity?
The nurse on duty called the police. After the police arrived, the matter did not become any clearer. Instead, it seemed more and more like some clumsy joke.
The first to arrive were two local officers, both quite young, their uniforms still damp with the night air. They stood at the duty desk and flipped through the passport, whose edges had curled slightly from moisture, then raised their heads to look at the man lying in the hospital bed. They exchanged a glance. One of them picked up the phone and called the station, relaying the information they had and asking them to check whether the Dutch embassy could be contacted to search the system for this so-called “Verstappen.”
“When will he wake up?” the other asked.
The doctor was washing his hands. Hearing this, he turned around and said, “If I knew, he wouldn’t still be lying here.”
The officer half-joked that perhaps the son had stolen his father’s passport and come out to swindle people. But that was not right. Who would choose to use a passport? And besides, they looked far too alike, unless everyone in that family had looked identical since childhood.
The beeping of the instruments enveloped the entire space. The electrocardiogram was as perfect as an illustration in a textbook. That should not have been the case. His breathing and heartbeat should not have been so steady.
Verstappen’s mystery did not end there.
The officer who had made the call put down the phone. Her expression was grave. She walked back into the conversation, and everyone instinctively fell silent at the look on her face, as if she had seen a ghost.
“I just received word,” she said, her voice very soft, still trembling. “Perhaps this really is Max Verstappen himself. But — he disappeared in 1964. In Massachusetts.”
And they were in Switzerland.
No one answered.
They gathered around the bed and looked once more at Verstappen’s face. Seen up close, that face was even more unsettling. Did this mean he had never aged? That everything had been completely suspended — perhaps even his soul?
They suddenly scattered.
Max woke two days later in the afternoon. A nurse was drawing his blood. When she met those sea-blue eyes, she nearly screamed. Who knew what Verstappen was now? Her hand trembled, but the needle remained steadily inserted in his vein, blood slowly flowing through the tube. The nurse first saw those eyes, then saw her own reflection falling inside them. For an instant, she had the illusion that she was being watched by something older than humanity.
The man in the bed blinked, as if merely disturbed from an overlong sleep.
She immediately pressed the emergency button at the bedside and informed the doctor on duty that Max had awakened. Then, with the calmest voice she could manage, she told Max that he was now in a hospital in Bern, frightened by and yet anticipating whatever reaction he might have.
Max did not even blink. He was like the computer at the front desk that was still booting up. At last, he let out a long sigh.
“Is it 1964 now?”
The question left the nurse unsure how to answer, but she still said, “No. It is 1983. June 22, 1983, Mr. Verstappen.”
“Doctor, not mister—”
He corrected her instinctively, as he always had in the past whenever someone addressed him with the wrong prefix. But he only wearily closed his eyes again, as though, after endless repetition, he had finally broken through the loop and returned to time running in a straight line.
The doctor took out his small flashlight and examined his pupils. The contraction response was normal. Heart rate normal. Breathing normal. Blood pressure was low, but for a man who had been lying in the mountains for who knew how long, it was acceptable enough.
What was strange, however, was that there was also an old bite mark near his gland. It was not fresh. Judging by the canine marks, it had likely been the work of an Omega, and the pheromone test showed that the pheromones left by this Omega were extraordinarily stable, as if the two of them had bonded again not long ago.
“Dr.Verstappen, do you remember what happened in the past? Perhaps someone close to you, such as a partner?” the doctor asked. He had already had the laboratory test the blood three times. If there had been such a person, and if Max remembered, then the experience during his disappearance would be easily solved, though it would only pull out still more questions.
If he had been alive, why had he not contacted his family? Had they been together for the past nineteen years? Why had he been found alone and unconscious in the Alps?
No one found any of this reassuring.
Max stared straight at the doctor until the latter could almost no longer bear the pressure and was about to look away. Only then did he slowly say, “No.”
“Does anything hurt?” the doctor asked.
Max’s gaze paused on the needle in his arm.
“No.”
“Headache? Nausea? Chest tightness?”
“No.”
“How long were you in the mountains?”
“I don’t know.”
Somehow, this was the only reasonable part of the conversation.
About three hours later, after Max completed all his examinations and returned to the ward, the area beside his hospital bed was already packed with people: his mother, his sister, his nephews, and his friends were all there. When Sophie saw him, her legs almost gave out, and she fell straight into Victoria’s arms.
Max’s gaze swept across every person there.
He alone had been left in the past.
His mother embraced him and cried bitterly. How could she not? Not long after Max left Europe for Boston, he had been reported missing. During twenty years without a trace, she had wavered more than once, thinking perhaps Max had died in a foreign land, and they would never know what had killed him.
When he was embraced, Max’s expression finally changed. He closed his eyes and hugged his mother tightly in return. It was then that people noticed the ring on his ring finger.
If one looked carefully, it was not a ring that could be easily overlooked, yet after all these days, everyone only noticed it at this moment.
It was a gold ring. The pattern engraved on it had become somewhat blurred; one could just barely make out a ship. But rather than a ship, it looked more like a sealed container. In the center of the hull was a long, thin vertical seam cutting downward from above. It looked like a wound that would never heal, or a door that was in the process of opening.
Above the ship was a star. The star was very small and extremely simple, yet its long, slender eight-pointed outline could still be seen. It did not carry any gentle meaning of guidance. It merely hung there coldly, like an eye nailed into the air.
His friends stood behind, wiping away their tears. Max’s gaze also turned toward them. Charles and Daniel looked as though they had already cried once. They all looked like old men.
He remembered how, when they used to gather together, they had discussed how they would grow old in the postwar era of peace, what the future would be like. They would serve as one another’s best men. Their children would grow up together. They would walk into the new world together.
They had achieved all of that.
Only Max had not been there with them.
Wind rose outside the window. The salty smell of the sea that it brought made him tremble.
He looked out the window, as if something there had knocked against the glass and was waiting for an invitation to enter.
The evening sky had turned deep blue. The last of the sunset gave off a piercing orange-red glow, turning the entire world purple.
“I will return to your side when you’re standing in this same purple rain again.”
A familiar voice sounded beside his ear. Max seemed to be able to feel everything from when those lips had whispered at his ear, and the chill of that body pressed close against his own.
On March 12, 1964, Amsterdam had just emerged from three days of cold rain, and Max received an invitation letter from the USA.
The window frames of the old geography building had fallen into disrepair. Rainwater seeped through the cracks, soaking the wood of the windowsill with a damp, moldy smell. That afternoon, he had originally been correcting geomorphological mapping reports submitted by students, his red pen still paused over a foolish conclusion — “the retreat of the coastline is mainly due to the subjective wishes of the local residents” — when two knocks sounded outside the door.
Hannah, the department secretary, pushed the door open and placed a manila envelope on his desk.
“From America,” she said. “We’ve already called to confirm. It isn’t a prank.”
The first thing Max saw was the return address.
Arkham, Massachusetts.
He raised an eyebrow and opened the envelope. Inside was a formal typed invitation letter with unusually cautious wording, two pages of supplementary explanation, and several roughly developed black-and-white photographs. They were all from Miskatonic University — a university that, even across the Atlantic in Amsterdam, was not exactly obscure.
But its reputation was mixed.
The people from that university were always chasing after things that were not recognized. Although they had been rejected again and again by the academic world, they always somehow managed to revive themselves in obscure journals.
The sender came from a temporarily assembled joint archaeological team. The main members were faculty and several doctoral students from Miskatonic University, while the others came from several universities in Boston, as well as the Salem Historical Society.
In the letter, they first spent an entire half page listing Max’s papers and lecture records over the past ten years on North Atlantic coastal geomorphological change, glacial deposition, and the restoration of historical maps. Their tone was so polite it bordered on flattery. Only then did they finally get to the point.
They had discovered an underground site near Salem.
More precisely, the first to discover it had not been archaeologists, but a collapse. After heavy rain at the end of winter, a large patch of ground at the edge of the woods suddenly sank downward, exposing an enormous black stone surface. Locals originally thought it was merely exposed underground bedrock. Only when someone cleared away the mud and broken branches covering it did they discover that it was not naturally formed bedrock, but a stone structural surface with neat edges and angles that made no sense. Deeper in, there was even a void extending downward, like the abdominal cavity of some building that had been completely buried underground.
Even this was not enough to startle Max.
It was not much in itself. The North American continent had never lacked mysterious legends, colonial ruins, and misidentified human remains. Most of the time, so-called “astonishing discoveries” ultimately turned out to be collapsed cellars, Indigenous mounds, exaggerated church foundations, or perhaps some wine cellar left behind by a local gentleman’s ancestors — where one might even find the bones of enslaved people cruelly persecuted by those ancestors.
But as he read further down, Max’s fingers slowly stopped.
What truly made his gaze pause was the next paragraph in the supplementary explanation: the archaeological team had found a large number of marine transgression traces in the upper soil of the site that did not belong to the local inland environment. These included tiny broken shells, salt deposits, rounded gravel that would only form after long-term seawater erosion, and distributions of moisture marks completely inconsistent with the surrounding water system.
In other words, that place looked as if it had once been submerged by seawater.
But according to existing maps and strata, it should not have been so.
Max turned past the first page and picked up the photographs.
The first photograph showed the collapse opening. The woods and mud were both ordinary. Only the exposed stone surface in the center was so black that one could not make out anything at all, like a black hole swallowing everything.
The second photograph was taken closer. One could see lines of varying depth carved into the stone surface. They did not look like decorative patterns, yet one could barely make out lines that seemed to resemble animals.
The third was the blurriest. The camera seemed to have trembled at the moment the photographer pressed the shutter, showing only a vague entrance descending underground. Its edges were wet, as if something had just licked it.
Hannah could tell that Max was very interested. His eyes were almost shining.
“You’re really going? This doesn’t sound like the kind of work you should be doing. Can’t those archaeology and geology people handle it?”
“They probably already tried. Because only when archaeologists, geologists, and local historians all fail to convince one another,” he said, placing the photographs back on the desk and meeting Hannah’s disapproving gaze, “would Miskatonic University think to invite a geography professor to clean up the mess. You didn’t believe the ark and flood mentioned in their letter, did you?”
“Besides, aren’t you curious? What exactly happened in that place? If it’s a fraud, then my work will probably be simple, and it comes with a generous fee. Look at the check they offered me. And if it’s real, Hannah, we could make history. We really might have discovered the existence of a world-destroying flood. Think about it.”
Her gaze fell to the end of the letter.
There was also a handwritten note there, its writing hurried, the ink so dark it was nearly black:
According to manuscripts held in the Orne Library, this place was once described as “the sea coming ashore where it should not.” Additionally, the “ark” in local legend is not a ship. Do not enter the lower level of the site alone at night.
The office was quiet for a moment.
Hannah asked, “Why you?”
Outside the window, the rain had already stopped. The canal water reflected a lead-gray light. Downstairs, a student rode past on a bicycle, the bell brief and crisp.
“I met one of their professors at an academic lecture a few years ago. They probably knew me from then. I didn’t expect them to have kept my card.”
Max picked up the photograph of the entrance again.
“Please reply for me. I’ll go.”
Twenty days later, he landed at Logan Airport.
He arrived in the evening. By the time he came through customs and got into the car arranged by Miskatonic University, it was also evening when he truly reached Salem — an evening with a violet-pink sky. The little town had long since shed its former heaviness and looked as harmless as any other American town, but the damp salt of a harbor still floated in the air.
Just like the description in the letter: the sea coming ashore on unpromised land.
Max began to suspect whether something impossible had happened here.
But he disliked such descriptions. Those Puritans always had this tendency. Once colonial history, religion, or death was involved, they always had to write sentences like epitaphs, as if as long as they were obscure and mysterious enough, errors would automatically become prophecies, or the will of God.
The car drove into Salem. He did not know what he had been expecting. Perhaps something as foolish as the Baroque age, where crossing the border meant crossing into another realm, as if he were acting in The Twilight Zone.
Clearly, this small city was not the sort of place in his imagination that was still occupied by torches, nooses, and black robes. It had already been given a new look. The county and state governments had reached an agreement, and they had begun trying to use the infamous witch trials as a selling point.
History was repackaged. Death, and lynching that was almost beastlike in nature, had become part of the revenue stream. Witches hung on keychains or were printed on postcards, waiting in glass cabinets for outsiders to take out their money.
Max did not have many opinions about this.
Humans had always been good at turning things they could not bear into souvenirs. Perhaps one day Nazi German medals would become collectibles too.
The driver dropped him in front of an inn near an old intersection. It was not on the main street and stood in a slightly remote location. Judging from the outside, it was only three stories tall. The outer stone walls were thickly covered in ivy, though if the weather were right, one could imagine it blooming into a sheet of orange-red flowers.
There were not many windows. In front of the door hung a sign already darkened by wind and rain. On the sign was written only the inn’s name:
The Ark.
Max stood at the entrance and looked at the sign for three seconds.
To be honest, he was really not a religious fanatic, so perhaps this inn was the ark of local legend. But that still did not explain everything.
The driver carried his luggage through the front door. Inside was first a corridor nearly five meters long. The dark carpet was embroidered with golden patterns. Max was not a historian, but he could tell that this was not something he could afford.
On both sides of the walls were two identical murals. Only when he stopped to examine them carefully did he notice the differences. The mural on the left was full of female animals, while the one on the right showed the corresponding males. They were being chased by waves, and at the front of them were not Noah and his family.
It was indeed a family, but their faces could not be seen clearly. Rather than being covered by gray pigment, it was more as if the color in that area had been swallowed.
At the end of the corridor was the front desk.
A tall man stood there waiting. He had brown curls, sea-blue eyes, and full, vivid lips. He wore the uniform of a hotel attendant: a white shirt and a red waistcoat. He stood very straight, doing nothing, merely facing forward and smiling, like a statue — or like someone who had been waiting only for Max.
“Mr. Russell, this is the professor specially invited by the archaeological team. My task is complete,” the driver said casually to Russell. The latter smiled and nodded, bidding him farewell.
“May I see your passport? Just to register your name.”
Russell was now smiling at him, and Max found it very difficult to say no.
He took out his passport. Russell’s eyebrows rose slightly.
“Dutch? How rare. We seldom have foreigners here. It seems the people at Miskatonic really have run out of options.”
“I’m not the only foreigner here, sir,” Max said, leaning against the desk.
Russell made no attempt to hide his accent.
“There is a slight difference. At least this inn is my inheritance, Dr.Verstappen.”
When he spoke Max’s surname, Russell deliberately emphasized it.
“Max. Being too formal always makes me think of my father.”
“Of course. In return, please call me George. Sir Russell is my father.”
There was a sweetness in his every movement. At first, Max almost could not believe his own nose. He had never seen an Omega so tall, but the scent of green apples could not lie.
“Come on. Bring your luggage. I’ll take you to your room.”
“What? You’re not going to help me carry it?”
Max looked at George, then looked at his three large suitcases, wondering whether the tipping culture he had heard about was only something people had told him to tease him.
“Me? Max, I’m an Omega. You want me to carry your luggage? Where is your chivalry? Your gentlemanly manners?”
George widened his eyes in feigned surprise. He looked at Max as though the most absurd thing in the world was an Alpha expecting an Omega to carry his luggage for him.
“You just said this is your inn.”
“Yes,” George said confidently. “I’m responsible for owning it. Carrying luggage is not something that comes with that.”
In the end, of course, Max carried his luggage upstairs himself.
George walked ahead of him. His steps were light, his shoulders and back straight, his narrow waist drawn in by the waistcoat. The staircase of the old house creaked in displeasure when stepped on, but most of the sound came from beneath Max’s feet. George knew exactly where every wooden board would protest, and always managed to avoid it.
He led Max through the second-floor corridor and stopped before a room facing east. The key slid into the lock and turned softly.
“This is your room.” George pushed open the door. “You can see a little of the woods from the window. If you wake at six in the morning, you may also see the people from Miskatonic waiting outside. They like proving they’re engaged in serious research by starting work far too early.”
“You don’t like them?”
“I don’t dislike them,” George said, handing him the key. “I just find it rather amusing when a group of people are clearly frightened yet insist on acting as if they’ve come to conquer the unknown. I have my own reasons.”
Max took the key. The dark-gold ring on George’s hand flashed. There seemed to be a ship engraved on its surface, but it was too small and too worn for Max to see clearly.
“You also know about the site?” he said.
“Salem isn’t that big. And I happen to be able to see that site, Max. They’re about as difficult to ignore as the stone pillars in Dunwich.”
George looked back at him and pulled half the curtain open for him.
Outside were gloomy tree shadows. A little violet-pink remained at the horizon, soon to be swallowed by night.
“The dining room has no formal dinner after eight, but there’s still food in the kitchen,” George said. “If you like, come downstairs and eat something. After such a long flight, and being forced to carry your own luggage, you look like you need compensation.”
“You’re very considerate.”
“I run an inn, Max,” George said. “Occasionally pretending to be considerate is part of the job.”
After the door closed, Max stood in the room and did not immediately unpack. He placed the manila envelope on the table, took out the photographs inside, and looked through them again.
Standing by the window, he found that he could indeed see a little of the site. Compared with the photographs, the real thing felt entirely different.
At half past eight, he went downstairs after taking a proper shower and changing clothes. Max wondered whether he could ask the owner for a cup of coffee.
The dining room was at the back of the first floor. It was a little smaller than the front desk area. Several dim yellow lamps hung on the walls. The tablecloths were white, embroidered at the corners with deep-blue patterns that looked like waves.
There were no other guests at this hour. Only George sat by the window. In front of him were two plates and an already opened bottle of red wine. A brass candlestick also stood on the table. He was no longer wearing that red waistcoat, only a white shirt and dark trousers, the cuffs rolled up. His ring gave off a very faint glow under the lamp.
“I thought I was here for dinner,” Max said, walking over. “Not for a private date with the owner.”
“You may also understand it as inn service,” George said, pulling out the chair for him. “We rarely have honored guests here, especially honored guests whom Miskatonic paid to invite. I must make sure my money is well spent.”
“You sponsored this project?”
Max was startled. He began to wonder just how much inheritance George had received — was it like in novels, left behind by some distant uncle?
“More or less? My family funded the establishment of Miskatonic University. Aside from money, we donated countless ancient books, manuscripts, and of course land. Otherwise, how could it be mentioned in the same breath as Harvard?”
George took a sip of wine, his lips seeming stained with blood. Then he leaned slightly forward.
“My family came to Cape Cod aboard the Mayflower. You know, in search of the promised land.”
“Looks as though you succeeded. You found the land of milk and honey,” Max said, staring at him. In the flickering firelight, George’s profile looked mysterious and unfathomable.
But George only tugged at the corner of his mouth.
“Perhaps. Or perhaps they failed, and none of it was recorded.”
Dinner was simple: roasted fish, roasted potatoes, sourdough bread, and a bowl of cream soup. It tasted far better than he had expected — so good, in fact, that it almost did not match the damp, strange nature of the house.
George only drank wine. He did not touch anything on his plate. More often, he watched Max.
“What do you think that site is?” George suddenly asked. “Another empty excitement for them, or something truly worth investigating?”
Max swallowed bread with soup.
“If one only looks at the photographs, it resembles a misidentified underground structure. It could be an old cellar, an early colonial defensive work, or some sort of underground space used for religious purposes. The real trouble is the marine transgression traces in the soil. Salem could not have been submerged by seawater at any point. This will take time. Perhaps it has a cause that can never be explained.”
“You know, I once read a manuscript passed down in my family. All it required was the sea, a ship, and a group of people who believed themselves chosen. Salem later gave them new land, and also new fear. They soon discovered that the sea did not always remain where the sea ought to remain.”
“It? What is that? God?”
Max began to think about that piece of seventeenth-century history.
“You mean that site really is a religious place?”
George did not answer immediately. He lowered his head and looked at the red liquid in his wineglass. Firelight fell on the glass wall, making that bit of red look very deep, like a congealed shadow.
“They did discover a place,” he said. “Or rather, they created this place. That place made them believe that perhaps the stories in the Bible had not ended. The flood had only temporarily receded, and the world had merely been temporarily permitted to continue existing.”
Max listened with some impatience, and some excitement. These two emotions often appeared in him at the same time. He disliked the way this person before him always leaned toward the Bible, but he also did not deny how astonishing a discovery it would be if this truly were the ark.
“So you think it is the ark?”
“I think there may truly be an ark in the world,” George said. “It just may not be the one described in the Bible.”
“What would it be, then?”
George raised his eyes to look at him.
“What do you think is the ark’s most important function?”
“To preserve life during the flood.”
“Floating on the sea, facing the world-ending flood and rainstorm, waiting for the dove to return with a symbol of life…”
George spoke softly.
“What if I told you that was not how the ark works? What if I told you it is a pure white sailboat, floating above a mountain meadow that no longer exists, sailing beneath the stars?”
Max stopped.
The light in the dining room became darker, or perhaps it was only that night outside had completely fallen, making everything seem yellower, older. George sat across from him, his expression gentle, a small flame reflected in his sea-blue eyes. A strange golden light shimmered in them.
Before he could speak, Max heard the sound of water.
It was much like rain tapping against the window, or water dripping from a faucet that had not been fully closed. It came from within the walls, or from beneath the table, like a distant tide pushing across wooden boards, slowly swallowing the foundation of the inn.
He lowered his head and looked. The carpet was dry. There was no water around the table legs. But the sound remained, pressed against his eardrums, carrying a saltiness that he could almost taste.
“What’s wrong, Max?”
Max shook his head and treated the vision just now as the aftereffect of jet lag and poor rest.
He narrowed his eyes at George, trying to find some hint of teasing on his face.
“You’re making this up, aren’t you?”
As though waiting precisely for that sentence, George indeed laughed.
“Of course, doctor. I merely wanted to see whether you Dutch people also have something called a sense of humor. It is April Fools’ Day today. Don’t take anything I just said seriously.”
“All right. Good night, Max. Remember not to pull the curtains all the way shut.”
The Omega’s hand lingered on his shoulder for far too long — so long that Max nearly wanted to pull it over and kiss the palm.
Sleep came faster than he expected.
Perhaps it was the flight. Perhaps it was the red wine. Max collapsed onto the retro Baroque bed, and the softness of goose down soon made him unable to resist drowsiness.
After some unknown length of time, he heard water.
At first, it was very soft, like someone downstairs dragging a soaked wooden chest. Then the sound pressed against the walls, stepped up the stairs, crossed the floorboards of the corridor, and appeared at the foot of his bed without the door ever opening, drawing closer little by little.
Max opened his eyes, but did not wake.
There was light in the room. It was not moonlight, let alone lamplight, but a gray-white glow rising from beneath water. It enveloped him like something pale beneath the surface was floating upward and about to meet him.
In this light, the edges of the furniture blurred. The patterns on the wallpaper seemed to swim slowly. Everything resembled a watercolor painting.
A whale’s cry came from outside the window.
Only then did he look outside.
The woods around the hotel had long since vanished. In their place was a black sea. The surface of the sea rose above the third floor and pressed silently against the glass. Pieces of wood and pale cloth floated in the water, along with smaller things that looked like shells, yet also like teeth.
But none of this was what shocked him most.
Above the sea was a colossal ship. If a black hole swallowed everything, then this ship looked like something forever incapable of being stained by anything — pure white. On the deck, someone was lying there, looking down at him. Beside that person lay a leopard. He watched the world beneath the ship, not knowing whether he pitied the world below sea level that had finally been abandoned.
A raven perched on the mast. Its cries guided the direction. The white ship slowly sailed away, toward the horizon.
And George stood by the window.
He wore a white shirt, the collar open, the sleeves soaked through, his hair dripping water. He looked as if he had just been pulled from the sea. Water slid down his cheeks and fell to the floor, yet it did not splash. It only left dark-red wet marks, which were soon absorbed by the wooden boards.
“I warned you,” George said.
Max sat up and found he could not speak.
George walked toward him. Each step was very light, and the wooden boards made no grating creak. He came to the bedside and bent down to look at Max. His eyes were blue like the deep sea, yet the golden rings around his pupils were shining.
“You people who believe in evidence always have to touch the wound with your own hands before you are willing to admit that the knife is real.”
His hand fell against the side of Max’s face, cold as ice.
“Why are you troubled? And why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet, and know that it is I myself. Touch me and see. A spirit has no flesh and bones, as you see that I have.”
Max grabbed his wrist almost by instinct.
George did not break free.
The apple scent in the dream grew somewhat stronger, but there was no sweetness in it. It was like a green apple that had been cut open and left too long in saltwater, its flesh already whitening.
They were too close.
Close enough for Max to see the sheen of water on George’s lips. He felt George’s hand gently touch his neck. What would come next — intimacy, or murder?
George lowered his head and kissed him.
The kiss had no warmth. It tasted of seawater, rust, and rotting wood, yet it made Max’s canine teeth ache, as if some older instinct in his body had been pried open. George sat on the edge of the bed, knees pressed beside Max’s legs, and slowly began undoing the buttons of his own shirt.
The first.
The second.
The third.
His movements were slow, carrying the shame George had only barely overcome. The white fabric slipped open to either side. The first thing revealed was his pale chest. The skin was smooth, cold as plaster.
Then Max saw a line.
It extended from the center of George’s collarbones all the way downward, passing through his sternum until it disappeared into the shirt and shadows.
Was that a scar?
It did not look like one. Scars heal. New flesh grows, leaving behind marks, but none of that existed here. That line was more like someone had once used an extraordinarily sharp knife to split his torso down the middle, then patiently closed the exterior again, leaving only a seam that could not fully shut. That person had not even left any traces of stitches.
George lowered his head and looked at it, as if only then remembering the matter.
“Ah,” he said. “You saw.”
He raised his hand, placing his fingertips at the top of that line.
Then he opened himself.
There was no blood. No ribs. No heart. None of the wet heat and stench that should exist when a human body was opened.
There was nothing inside George’s torso.
It could not even be called a cavity, because at least a cavity should have boundaries.
There was a black, slowly undulating water surface. Starlight sank beneath the water. Countless tiny white fragments floated among the stars, like communion wafers ground into powder.
Max finally made a sound, unable to tell whether it was a gasp or a curse.
George still sat before him, shirt open, body opened from the center, his expression quiet almost to the point of devotion. Where his heart should have been, there hung only a tiny point of light, like an eight-pointed star, and also like an opened eye.
Each time that point of light beat, the sound of water in the room came a little closer.
“They gave everything they could give,” George said. “Blood, bones, names, futures. But He does not eat what they thought should be eaten.”
He took Max’s hand and guided it toward the opened edge.
Max’s fingertips did not touch flesh.
He touched cold dampness.
He touched salt, wood, and a fine ash.
It felt like reaching into the inside of a sunken ship, and also like reaching into a coffin that had not been opened for many years. The edges of George’s skin were soft and pale, but inside there was no skeleton supporting him. He still maintained the shape of a human only because something had not yet allowed him to fall apart.
“What are you?” Max asked.
Was this his stigmata?
George smiled. That smile was still beautiful, even carrying a little of the lightness from daytime. But before his opened shell, it seemed far too cruel.
“I was once a son,” George said. “Later, a sacrifice. Later still, they said I was the key.”
Water spread out from his body.
Not blood.
Seawater.
Black seawater flowed along his abdomen, waist, and the sheets, quickly soaking the entire room. In the water were the shadows of animals, passing by the foot of the bed two by two: cattle, deer, sheep, ravens, snakes, and some things that should not have come in pairs. None of them had eyes, yet all of them were watching Max.
George bent down close to him. The black water in his opened chest nearly touched Max’s skin.
“If the ark truly could preserve us,” he asked softly, “why is there nothing left inside me?”
The black sea outside the window slammed against the glass.
Max woke.
The room was pitch black.
He sat up violently, breathing fast, the back of his neck cold, as if he had just been dragged from the water. The curtain had indeed not been fully drawn. Only one narrow gap remained. Outside the window there was no sea, only the Salem woods at night, branches swaying gently in the wind.
Max lowered his head and looked at his hand.
There was a little gray-white powder on his fingertips, fine as ground bone. He brought his hand close to his nose and smelled apple, seawater, and the last faint sweetness of wood before it rotted.
Very soft footsteps came from downstairs.
One step.
Then another.
Then they disappeared.
Max looked at the faint firelight beneath the doorframe and knew very well that George was outside the door.
He was beginning to regret having accepted this job.