{ Profound & Emotional | Always Accepting }
The book beneath his hand was of course familiar to her – she had an intimate awareness of the covers designed to house her writings, having such a defining role in their production as she did. The moment she had seen it laid upon the table, Abigail had known there would be questions – curiosities – from the man who starred so prominently in that particular tale.
She had never considered the possibility that he might read them – not because she considered him an unlearned man, for she had seen the books that had lined his cabin with her own eyes and known many of them to be of academic importance to a more philosophical crowd of men – but because she had not considered stories such as these to hold any interest to a man who lived them, and whose taste in literature seemed so advanced beyond what she would ever be capable of producing.
What was more, she had never believed they would meet again, least of all under these circumstances. She didn’t fully know the truth of his retirement, only that it was clear to her that it had done something to bring a softness out in him she had never seen before. It left her in a strange position, for though she knew he was bound to start asking these questions – she still had no easy answers to offer.
“What is real about it?” Turning this around was perhaps the only hope she had of explaining anything to one of the few people alive in this world, who would know that her tales were not woven from imagination – not entirely. “All stories are just that, are they not? Embellishments and lies – even when they tell an honest truth, they must be made dishonest to tell it.”
Indeed – that particular book was the most honest retelling of the events of Charlestown she had ever written. Even now, the demons exorcised onto those pages left her raw. They still screamed inside of her, but their power had waned since she had granted them voices upon those pages.
The names were all different. Of the people and the ships, of the town and even of smaller things, like the streets. Yet it was the same story as her own – a girl stolen away by monsters, who later discovers the monster had been the one beside her all her life. Whose whispers had made her afraid, and whose crimes cost a town everything. It was one of the very, very few stories where the character most resembling Barlow died, and the only time – in any of her stories – that character died in so haunting and tragic a manner as the truthful one.
The tale built a sympathy for pirates that made it one of her less popular works. She was glad of it, for it meant few people sent letters to her pseudonym inquiring of it. Few people shining light on the demons that bled through those pages, strongest when they rose unexpectedly back to the ink in her well, demanding she bleed them out again, to poison another story.
“If that story bothers you, I’ve written others that tell different truths.” She offered quietly, thinking of one of her more popular works, which had become a short series about a mercenary who could not forgive the death of a mother any more than she could forgive the destruction of a town. Or perhaps the tales in which a woman holds her temper and metes out justice against all who had done her wrong.
Both of those stories were lies formed of wishful thinking, and the demons in them were mere shades of what came out in stories that held closer to the truth – but those demons were just as real. For there was a part of her that wished for the strength of the mercenary who breathed out her anger and loss in every violent action – a part of her that dreamed of a world where Barlow was alive and those who spread their lies were punished for it.
But neither world or woman was real. Neither of those stories would ever be as compelling as the ones about Captain Redbeard, nor any as haunting and painful as the time he tried to stop being a pirate, only to remember why he became one in the first place. He was a man of truth – a man who accepted there was darkness in the world and chose to face it, to defeat it where he could – but never lie about where it came from, or who spread it.
He had turned to liars in the hopes of becoming one himself – a man claiming to repent so that he may know peace – and that betrayal of himself was what cost him so dearly, even as it woke other characters to the reality he so often told them was there. Those who speak the most loudly, the most angrily of monsters – tend to be shrouding the fact that they, themselves, are the beasts one should fear above all others.
“It is but one truth as I see it. That doesn’t make it real to anyone but me.” She concluded softly, folding her hands in her lap to keep from fidgeting with them. “I am – sorry,” She added, feeling compelled to acknowledge the one demon they both shared, a woman whose kindness had been an impossible strength. A woman who, when finally pushed beyond the edge of her patience, was so cruelly and abruptly silenced by her own death, in a house where civilization dictated she ought to have been safe from such awful violence. “If the echoes of it are too true for you, as well. I cannot promise not to write of it again, if that is – why you are here.”
It burned inside of her, the need to keep that woman’s story alive even if all she knew of her was the last. There were times when Abigail felt as though she could not breathe for the sounds of the monsters inside of her were so cacophonous a riot, and if she did not let them scream, then surely the one who would start would be she. And she knew – she knew what happened to people who screamed at their demons no one else could see – so when those days hit, she would pick up her quill, and pour them into the ink. Until the day those demons were finally quiet, she could not promise anyone, not even him that she would, or even could, stop telling their stories.
Ocean Archive 