The Things We Know But Never Say

By Natalie Mills · Estimated Reading Time: 17 Minutes

This was the best cargo in months. It didn’t smell or leak, and it wasn’t illegal. It might not even be worth it for pirates to steal, so on the off-chance that they met a competent pirate, they might get away without losing a page. Because on this voyage, they were transporting books. Stacks and stacks of books, half of a university’s library, charitably given away by a wealthier school to a less fortunate one.

Even though this was easy cargo, it was the cargo Benjamin checked on the most. When he had a few hours where it seemed unlikely he would be missed, he would go down to the hold to keep an eye on it. First he would check for any water damage or mice that might be trying to burrow their way into the crates. Then he would open a crate and choose a book to inspect, page by page and line by line, until he was called back to other tasks or he finished the chapter.

He already knew some of the stories that he read in the books. The history books told of wars and businessmen, of atrocities and bloodshed, yet they contained very little sadness. He found books of fables he had heard as a child, a handful of science books, and a few maps of countries he had heard of but never knew how to spell.

One day, as Benjamin was inspecting the cargo, he came across a book that was unlike the others. Instead of a hardbound cover of maroon or evergreen, the pages were bound in flaps of limp brown leather, worn soft with time. Flipping through it, he saw that the pages were filled with slanting cursive instead of the usual blocky text. On the inside flap, the owner of the journal had written his name: Captain William Sutherland.

Benjamin couldn’t believe the find. Captain Sutherland was the most famous captain of the archipelago, ferrying settlers to the archipelago for more than three decades. Half of the people living on the islands had come over with Captain Sutherland, even Benjamin and his parents.

He began reading. Like most journals, the book gave a lot of details about dates in history that no one thought about anymore. But as Benjamin read, he saw the days go by, life on land unfold, the captain’s children grow up, and most importantly, the days and the weather at sea counted off in the top right of each page, another wayfarer like himself, tracking the time by the color of the horizon.

Suddenly this mythical figure, who in Benjamin’s memory was just a long coat and small eyes above an angry red beard, became a mortal, someone who wanted things he didn’t get and who missed things that he had lost.

Benjamin wasn’t sure why this book would be in with the others, simple books that could be found easily in bookshops across the archipelago, unlike this one, likely the only copy detailing the life of a famous man. As he held the soft leather in his hands, folding the flaps shut again, Benjamin worried about leaving it here with the rest of the cargo, like abandoning one diamond in a pile of rocks. He slipped the journal into his inside pocket and returned to work.

✷

The journal became a thin buffer of companionship between him and the rest of the world. When he could, he would take it out and continue reading, watching each day’s sunrise and sunset with Captain Sutherland. Even small items, like the Captain’s mention that he met an old friend at a well-known port, became details that Benjamin craved. Captain Sutherland walked these streets, he sailed these seas, he made the same decisions about the turn of the wind and the change of the seasons that shaped every day of Benjamin’s life.

The sentences in the journal were short and crisp, like messages barked out from the captain to his crew, back over the years of history. But one day, Benjamin opened the book and found that the next entry was long and thick with words, ink splashed over them in a rush.

What I saw today I would not believe, except that I had seen it and I am writing it down for you now. The sea is not what we think it is. The ocean is not contained by land, rather we are contained by the ocean, and we know nothing of its depths.

Today as I looked ahead toward our destination, I saw what few people even dare to tell stories about. We are adventurers not liars, so we tell of our adventures but not of myths. I have told stories of the storms that seemed to toss us in circles, of tornadoes across the water that flew within arm’s reach of my ship, of waves that crash over beaches higher than any tree I’ve ever seen. But this, I always thought was myth. It is not myth. I saw it today.

On the side of the ship, I saw a creature emerge from the water with a dark face, tentacles that seemed as long as the boat, as wide around as at least five men. On deck, a young boy saw it too and screamed. At the scream, it seemed to slip away. In the distance, another ship was sailing. A minute later, it was not. It was tugged, overturned, and dragged down into the ocean by black arms as thick as the oldest trees. This was not a stray cloud or a phantom, the ship was there and it was gone, just a small spot of whirling waves left in its wake. When I arrive at port, I will confirm what ship it was, and I have no doubt that I will hear that it went missing, attacked by pirates or lost to an iceberg, never to be seen again. That is not what happened.

Benjamin flipped to the next page in the journal. Nothing but daily notes, as the first part of the book had been. No more mention of it, yet Benjamin could picture it precisely from the short description that was there. He could picture the creature’s face and he could see the ship in the distance disappearing beneath the water. He could still feel the pricking of the rough wood on his skin as he had stood on the deck that day and screamed.

✷

Benjamin’s voyage to the archipelago had been padded comfortably by the presence of his parents, one on either side, trying their best to protect him from the reality of a bottomless ocean beneath their feet. Because of them, he never worried about the ocean. He was surrounded by blankets and hats from home, his mother’s perfume, and his father’s leather boots.

He spent his time on the deck looking out, hoping to see land first, so that he could be the one to shout “Land, ho,” and everyone would come running to see what he had been the first to discover. It was near the end of the journey that he finally saw something worth shouting about.

It was afternoon on a gray day. Clouds above, mud below, and a slight wind that had him buttoning and unbuttoning his coat as he went from too cold to too hot, the kind of day when your mind is restless and your body can’t calm down, when your shoes squeak and you shiver for no reason.

He had been looking out one side of the boat for a long time, so he decided to go to the other side, though the sun was so hidden that there seemed to be no difference in the two skies today. He went to the railing and looked out. Below him, a lifeboat clung to the side of the ship, fastened on with bolts as big as his hands. He imagined a storm where they would have to get in it, just a tiny boat on this big sea. But maybe if there was only the lifeboat and no ship, the little boat would feel big to him. It seemed big to him now as he imagined having the whole thing himself. He was staring at it so intently that at first he didn’t spot the ship slowly crossing the horizon in the distance, passing them like a grey mouse scuttling along a baseboard, hoping not to be seen.

Then he looked up and saw it. From a distance, he could make out the billow of the sails and the motion of the hull as it rose and fell with the waves. Just as he was about to yell out about the ship, announcing it to the rest of the boat, he noticed something else in the water much closer to them, just past the lifeboat he had been looking at.

The water began to swirl with something black and solid, a slick rope of skin under the surface. Suddenly, an eye looked up at him, the size of the globe that sat on his father’s desk, glossy and unblinking. It sat on a charcoal face that seemed frozen in terror, a mouth the could not close, an eye that could not blink. It was staring right at him. He began to yell without words, just a long screech, hoping that someone would hear his cry and come running.

At his cry, the creature slipped below again, throbbing with the waves. The eye was nowhere to be seen, the mouth now drowned in the water, the black figure slipping away. He looked back at the horizon to find the ship he had seen—a ship and a creature—no one would believe he was seeing both so close together. He spotted the ship again, its sails a gleaming white and its prow a glimmering gold. He could see a few figures dotting the deck.

Then, as he watched, the ship rocked and the little dots seemed to shake around. It was not a soft rock of waves or even the tumult of a strong storm, but a jerking rock, like when all the children would jump off the side of a rowboat at once or when he smacked the water as he played in a tub. The distant ship rocked again, its mast dipping toward the ocean. A third rock and he saw the sails billow one last time, the mast sink below the water, and the bottom of the boat face up, sinking down. As it went down, he saw a dozen long arms, black and powerful, wrap around it, hugging it to itself, under the water. And even though he couldn’t see it, he knew that the creature he had seen was pulling the boat toward its open mouth and its unblinking eye to see what treasure it had found.

He had been unable to move like he was asleep in a bad dream. Then he felt himself again, his feet woozy on the deck, his hands red from clenching the railing. His voice found words and he screamed it all out: a ship, a creature, the ship, and now there was no ship anymore.

He heard the running of boots on the wooden boards. Two of the sailors came up behind him, afraid that he had seen someone fall overboard or that he was going to himself. They grabbed him and spun him around.

“What is it?” One asked, shaking his shoulder again and again.

“I saw it,” he still shouted, “In the water, I saw it. Did you see it?”

The second sailor looked out over the horizon. “What did you see?”

He didn’t have words for it. “A thing looked at me,” he stammered. “And there was a ship! It was out there and then it was gone. The thing dragged it under and ate it!”

The second sailor laughed nervously. “A thing ate a ship? I doubt it. Maybe it was some animals fighting and you thought it was a ship?”

“Things eat other things,” the first sailor laughed too, “That’s the ocean for you.”

The two sailors looked at him. “It was probably a shark hunting something that you thought was a ship.”

He stood looking up at them, feeling the distance between their height and his. Could they not see it from up there? Was he the only one who knew? Then he looked back at the water again, panicked that he was missing something else.

“No,” he turned back to say, “It wasn’t a shark. It was big and black and the water swirled.”

At this the taller of the two sailors crouched down and grabbed his shoulder. “You’re wrong,” he said, “And now you’re lying about it. Do you know what happens to little boys who lie on boats?”

Benjamin shook his head. The man’s fingers pinched into his shoulder, and Benjamin’s eyes watered.

“They get wrapped up in a sail, tied up with a rope, and locked up with a chain. And then they get thrown overboard.”

Benjamin looked at the other sailor. The other man staring down at him as well, arms folded.

“Do you understand now?” The crouching sailor asked him. Seeing Benjamin looking elsewhere, he grabbed Benjamin’s chin and pulled his face closer, so close that Benjamin could see the rot on his front teeth and a dribble of something crusted on his chin. “Do you understand?”

Benjamin nodded, wanting to get his face away from this man’s ugly breath, his shoulder feeling smashed like a snail’s shell in the man’s hand. The sailor threw back Benjamin’s shoulder and stood up. He and the other sailor walked away, each turning to look back at Benjamin as they did.

He watched them disappear around a corner and then turned back to see what the sea had to say. There was nothing in the water but the normal waves.

That night, his parents came back from their dinner, and he was still awake in his bunk, sitting straight up, staring at the wall. His mother beckoned him down and he squeezed between them.

“A bad dream?” she asked.

He shook his head no. Not a bad dream.

For the rest of the trip, he saw nothing. Not even a larger-than-normal fish or a castaway net. There was only the sea and the sky, dancing together in a slow tangle to bring the sun down and the stars up each night of their trip.

✷

Over the years, Benjamin had tried to find a friend in this dark secret, someone else who knew what the ocean held. When he was first sailing, he had been at a port on the far tip of the archipelago when his ears pricked at a familiar description. “Black as a hole and triple the girth of a tree,” he heard a man say at the table nearby. “Its arms will reach up around a boat and take the whole thing under, no survivors, not a chance.”

This was the first that Benjamin had heard of the creature since he had seen it himself. He had looked through every book he could find, visited every library he could, and prodded old sailors for their tales of horror, but he had never turned up any mention of a creature like his own. The man went on.

“They say that the boat hit an iceberg, or that the pirates got it, or a storm blew it off course, but nothing ever turns up. And sometimes they even deny it ever existed, not wanting to scare people off.”

Benjamin felt his story welling up in his throat. He wanted to jump in, to say that he knew and he had seen it too, that these ships were gone for no good reason and we would all be better for knowing it. But something stopped him from speaking.

Before he could cough up words, another sailor leaned over the table, his bulk blocking the man completely.

“You had better be careful,” he said, “Because lies summon death. And your lies summon the worst kind of horror. You don’t know what you’re talking about at all.” The sailor sank back, waiting to see what the man would do.

The tale-teller swaggered, leaning back in his seat. “You are the one who lies, and I’m the one who really knows. Just wait until the day those arms come for you.”

The sailor laughed at the man, an angry, supercilious laugh, “You’re insane. Just another former sailor who wasn’t good enough to keep the ocean out of his head.”

The man shrugged. “You’ll learn when you’re dead.”

At this, the sailor, who had laughed at the notion just moments before, lurched forward across the table, knocking plates aside and tipping a full mug. He grabbed the man by the shoulders and dragged him out of his chair. Together with his friends, they walked him out the door, one pinning his arms and the others jeering. Benjamin heard later they had beaten him up and thrown him off the deepest dock. Let him swim back in the water he was so afraid of.

✷

Even though their destination was only a few days away, they decided to stop at a friendly harbor for a night with their cargo of books. They would get into the port at sunset and set out again at dawn. Benjamin left the boat with the rest of the crew, feeling the weight of the journal even more now, no longer a comfortable padding between himself and the world, but an unpredictable friend who might blow aside the water to let that dark creature be seen by the world. A book that might get Benjamin thrown off the end of a dock if he stayed out too late and said too much.

Tonight, Benjamin opted to eat by himself, devouring a meal of chowder and fresh-baked bread at the pub in town. Then he went back to the ship and took his turn in bed, trying to sleep. Unlike the others, who sank into a deep sleep quickly, he tossed and turned until he couldn’t lie still any more. The darkness of his bunk with the grunts of the other sailors made him feel like an animal in a stable, like the horses they would put in the stalls when he was growing up. The horses would stamp and snort until they fell asleep all in a row. He didn’t want to be a horse in a stable tonight.

He went onto the deck, looking out at the stars above him, feeling small in a world so big, listening to the murmurs of the sailors sleeping below deck.

Then he heard a sound that did not fit—a creak, like someone tugging on the lifeboat that hung on the side of the ship. He waited for the boat to smack back into the wooden side of the ship, for the whole ship to rock, for the sails to take in one last gust of air before the whole boat capsized, but tonight there was nothing. He pictured the tentacles of the scream-faced creature reaching up to grab the lifeboat, but they were snugly in port, waters too shallow for a creature like that.

Instead, he heard scurrying, not of mice in the walls, but of human hands reaching for what they could not see in the dark. He heard them move towards the depths of the ship, toward the cargo, sitting quietly in crates below.

He followed the noises toward the stairs, and he paused. Should he get run to get help? Or follow the noises alone?

He stood deciding on the ladder when he smelled smoke. It was not the smoke of a pipe or a cooking fire, but a dusty unfamiliar smoke, curling up from where the cargo was stored. He raced down the ladder and saw two people in the dark, circling the crates with torches. They turned in the smoky haze and saw him there at the bottom of the ladder. He watched them as his eyes adjusted to the dark. Then they dropped their torches on the crates and charged forward.

The flames flickered in the crates, pages browning to nothing and covers glowing. One intruder pushed him toward the fire while the other scrambled up the ladder. He raced after them, yelling for help. The fire was scorching and smoking. The books were quickly disappearing to ash. If the fire didn’t stop, the whole boat would go aflame.

The other sailors came running out of their sleep and into the blaze, the flames now lapping at the ladder and the walls around the books. They bailed water into the compartment, tamping down the flames closest to the fire, working their way around the walls, and finally soaking the books. Every book was mangled through with either smoke or water, dripping in the center of the hold. Every book except the journal that had stayed safely under his coat and shirt, tucked into his inside pocket.

✷

Those were good pirates, the sailors agreed. They are getting craftier.

The story spread like this: At night, pirates had snuck onto the ship, hearing that it contained cargo that was small and precious and could be easily stolen. Some versions said gold, others jewels, another said the crown of a neighboring prince who famously lost his months earlier. Then, finding nothing precious and worth stealing, they tried to sneak back out, but they were interrupted and, in a panic, they lit the ship on fire to get away while the sailors saved the ship.

But Benjamin was there in the hold, and he knew that the books were on fire before he had entered. They were not pirates there to steal. They were only there to create flames, to destroy something in the books that shouldn’t be allowed to remain. He felt the weight of the journal against him and remembered what it said: “The sea is not what we think it is. The ocean is not contained by land, rather we are contained by the ocean, and we know nothing of its depths.”

The journal was the only book unlike the others. To destroy the others, the pirates would have had to find every copy across the archipelago in every child’s classroom and university library and sidestreet bookshop. But Benjamin knew that there was one book, one lonely page that might be worth destroying, if the people who knew Captain Sutherland were worried for his reputation, if the people who made money from the voyages wanted to keep their ships afloat on the sea, if the sailors working the ships wanted to assure themselves that they knew the risks they faced.

Benjamin felt the weight of the journal, of that one single page. He felt his face flush as it had when he was a child and had been scolded for saying what he had seen. He felt his anger at the man in the pub for shouting about the creature and bringing bruises and the long swim back to shore upon himself. He felt his disappointment in Captain Sutherland, who could have told the whole ship what he had seen that day, only to stay silent, sending a single page of hope after his death years later, a single page that could so easily be destroyed, and no one needed to speak of it ever again.

✷

It was the final day of the journey. Benjamin stood on the deck of the ship, looking out at the ocean before him matching the sky above. Behind him, the books that had been salvaged rustled in the wind, their pages drying crisp and salty. He held the captain’s journal and looked around the deck. No one was paying attention to him. People were spreading out books, rigging the sails, pushing crates aside to make way for the ropes that needed to come through. His fingers held tight against the journal, its leather sides still soft like calfskin under his thumbs, unlike all the other books that had been charred by the fire and doused by seawater.

He held it—confirmation of the thing they all feared and all mocked, the terrible thing that he had watched as a child glide to the surface and swallow the neighboring ship whole. He pictured the laughter of the sailors that day. Was it more fearful than mocking? He pictured the man in the pub who had insisted that this was the truth, the look of fear in every new sailor’s eye when he heard it, the look of anxious anger when the veteran sailors realized what he was saying.

“We have enough to deal with on the surface of the water without also fearing what is beneath it,” Benjamin thought. And with that, he tore out the page in the journal that confirmed all of their worst fears, its dense black writing cleanly tugged out of the book. He crumpled the page in his hand and tossed it into the sea. It rested for a moment like a white flower on the surface, then overtaken by a wave, sank out of sight.

Behind him, a new gust of wind came through, rifling the books, shivering along their spines as the pages blew back and forth. The rest of the crew continued on in their work, unaware of anything but the ship they were on and the place they were going. Benjamin dropped the journal into an empty space on the deck, now just another book among many, an old captain’s journey with nothing new to tell.

Turning back to the sea, he looked out as he had many times. Today was a turquoise day. An unfiltered sun created chains of gold on the crest of every wave. The wind ruffled the water and he thought, just for a moment, that he saw it roil with something black and slick coming from the depths. But it was nothing, and the ship sailed on as he looked out, his eyes scanning back and forth across the horizon.

✷

Story by Natalie Mills

Share this on Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest