All that happened later went very fast.
The Whydah Gally jolted before breaking into two blocks. The main desk opened wide like a huge mouth, its central body swallowing up all the unfortunate people around it. Afterwards, the prow section broke off from the central body and fell into the water once more. It was a single blow, muffled in part by a gloomy sound in the background. The stern started bending on the opposite side. Bellamy grasped at a rope and found himself dangling near the mizzen mast. He tried to climb till the observation mast. The rope was treacherous and slippery with rain and it scraped his hands. He didn’t care. When he came to the top, he had just enough time to consider whether to dive into the sea, as the jump could be deadly. What was worse, the whirlpool of the sinking vessel could drag him away. However, his wonderings had a short life: he opened his eyes wide while his heart had a sudden stop.
Through the watery wall towering above the ship a Cyclopean shape appeared, dominating over the remains of what once had been the Whydah Gally. The sound which had accompanied the bow fall got louder and he could identify the guttural noise of a threatening rumble. The rumble became then a grinding of teeth and that grinding became a roar. He could see an ochre eye clearly, with a blood-red pupil flashing in the middle.
It was staring at him.
It was huge.
In his last moment of life, Bellamy stopped to gaze at that horrible sight. The vessel was finally breaking to pieces under his feet, swollen forever by the mysteries inhabiting the abysses of the Devil’s Triangle.
PART ONE
We expect life to be meaningful: but life has exactly the meaning we are ready to give it ourselves.
HERMANN HESSE
CHAPTER ONE
PORT ROYAL
Jonathan Underwood opened his eyelids, in spite of the sleepiness making his body still numb. His thoughts started slipping slowly, like drops on an opaque glass surface. From the only window in the room, he could see the sun beams falling oblique on the floor planks, dragging dusty specks in their track.
He lived with his mother in a room on the second floor of a crumbling building, like many others downtown. The Pàssaro do Mar inn below had welcomed its customers till late at night, so he had fallen asleep lulled by laughs and screams. However, as it often happened to him when he found himself in the middle stage between sleep and wake, he was wondering about the fact that those noises weren’t keeping him awake more than his curiosity about the stories told by the customers.
He was born and had grown up in the town that many people considered as the wealthiest and most ill-famed in the world. Anne always kept telling him. He had never got into serious trouble. Some acts of bravado… very usual for a boy of his age. But according to his mother, the world was dangerous and Port Royal above all.
Civilization is also that, his father had explained him once. Only it is lived differently here. And you will have to do the same, Johnny.
He decided to get up. He moved to the window, stopping for a moment in the middle of the room to fix the leotard slipping on his naked legs. He opened the shutters, encrusted with salt. A wave of light hit his face. He lifted a hand instinctively to protect himself and waited patiently for the nuisance to pass by. When he got used to it, he let himself be charmed by the wonderful landscape.
The bay was lapped by a large stretch of crystal water. Rocky walls, their tops covered in vegetation, surrounded it in a messy semicircle. Foaming waves were breaking softly against the coast, pushed by the wind running into the straight connecting the inlet to the open sea. The western part of the beach grew thin into a sandy string in the shape of a horseshoe, where Fort Charles stood. On the fortress’s main tower the English flag was waving proudly.
Johnny kept gazing at that wonder. He could distinguish the houses, the stores and the docks where the ships were laying at anchor to let the crews get down. Flocks of seagulls were flying among the masts, croaking in a choir.
“Johnny, are you awake?” His mother’s voice reached him behind the door.
“Yes”, he answered. “I’m coming.”
He was used to sleeping with Anne, also because they couldn’t do otherwise. With the little money they earned, it was a miracle if they could afford paying a rent to Bartolomeu, the innkeeper. Anne worked for him.
“Hurry up!”, she shouted once more, on the other side of the door. “Avery is waiting for you. You’ll be late as usual.”
Johnny could hear the typical reproaching tone he knew so well, followed by a cough soon after. He rolled his eyes. She had been ill for some days. And there had been no need of consulting a doctor to understand. He had tried to talk about that just once, but she had warned him, adding she was just tired.
“You’re just like your father”, the woman ended, trying hard to stop the spasms.
Always with my head in the clouds, Johnny thought.
The reason of Anne’s continual reproaches were about Stephen Underwood himself. She had never forgiven him for bringing her to Port Royal.
Thanks to the trade company he had founded, Stephen had been able to credit himself with a small part of the transport of the goods coming from England to the Caribbean Sea. It all had gone very well at first. The situation had come to a head later, because of the Indies Company monopoly. As if that wasn’t enough, some creditors the man had addressed to, had forced him to close his activity and declare bankruptcy. He had answered his wife’s never ending requests telling her he would leave as soon as possible to balance his debts. Anne had wanted to trust him, as usual. She surely couldn’t imagine she wouldn’t see him anymore in a few days.
Stephen Underwood had left on a ship flying the Dutch flag. Many rumours had started going around after his disappearance. Some people said he had been attacked by pirates and some others had seen the ship sinking off the Aruba coast, at the mercy of a storm. In spite of that, Anne had lost everything and had been forced to turn her well-to-do life habits upside down: she had had to find a job in the place she hated the most in the world.
The place which had taken her husband away from her.
And her dreams.
Every time his mother tormented him with this story, Johnny kept listening to her in silence. He didn’t dare contradict her, fearing to make her suffer. He had heard her crying next to himself at night and he had wondered why the Davies family hadn’t come to Port Royal to help them.
He came to know the truth once he reached adolescence. William Joseph Davies had never accepted his daughter’s departure to a part of the world where the idea of civilization was relative. By the way, Anne had kept in touch with her family, at least till her husband’s disappearance. She had then stopped replying to the letters coming from London. Johnny had thought that would last for a while, waiting for better times. But when he had found her burning the letters, he had understood that any link with the past was broken.
He got dressed very fast that morning. He tidied his dark locks up in front of a mirror whose borders were oxidized, then he opened and closed his mouth a couple of times. The scar on his left cheek got thinner till it became quite an invisible line. Some black and dirty spots had appeared on his teeth: he put a finger into a small basin next to him and brushed them with force.
When he had finished, he went down the stairs like his mother had done just a moment before; he believed he would find her on the landing coinciding with the back of the Pàssaro do mar, doing the tiding up. She was there in fact. She was singing a song. He greeted her quickly; Bartolomeu’s voice called her after a while.
“Anne, come here”, he said, in his strange Portuguese accent. Even if he was a very odd man, he was the only one who had offered her a place where to live and something similar to