Following my dismissal of Riven from the cottage, I was yet unable to make the trek down to Hertledge for a long span. I spent my days much as I had originally intended to spend them. My original manuscript had been set aside, and I wrote feverishly of my initial reactions to the channel and its few inhabitants. In addition to writing, I was walking frequently. It was not unusual in those days for me to spend two to three hours wandering the bluffs, for it was easy to do so. My small, unelectrified cottage was but an island in the sea of rocky outcroppings. I found that it took no more than a few moments for it to be entirely out of sight. Think of it! A whole residence disappeared from view in no more than fifty steps from the door. I hardly gave any thought at all to the unsavory potential such privacy might affect.

I enjoyed myself in those days. After the hectic beginning to my stay, things were, in their own way, starting to come around. It probably sounds utterly mad to say such a thing after being shot, but to a writer, whatever spark happens to move the story forward is a blessing full stop. While I had come to the channel to use its solitude for the benefit of a story of my own creation, the channel had butted in its head and made itself the story. I walked about the bluffs, an old moth-eaten hat from the cottage’s closet on my head, my walking stick at my side, and usually a half-eaten croissant in my jacket pocket. Since I could not yet get to town, Riven was still doing my grocery shopping. I had tried to tip him once, and he had given me the same look he had when I suggested he might have been a gardener. It was not lost on me that in my rambles, walking stick in hand, I must have looked quite a bit like my landlord. I often wondered if I might run into him as if into a mirror image, two men on a rock with overcoats and walking sticks. More than likely he’d turn his back and disappear once more. Disappearing seemed to be his specialty, even when saving my life.

After one of my longer walks, my calves aching from the strain, I thought it would be refreshing to take a short nap before getting to the business of writing. I was in a particularly difficult section, having reached the point where I intended to lay out for the reader everything I knew about Mr. Blud. However, I found myself in the situation of dear Melville and his whales, that is an abundance of enthusiasm for the subject but lacking in concrete details. I found sometimes in the past that naps helped me write once I had thoroughly woken once again.

My dream was not of the refreshing sort.

I was in the rowboat again, although in corporeality I had not seen it since my misfortune. Truth be told, I could not say whether the boat had even been recovered. There I was in the rowboat, and the weather was unlike I had ever seen it in the channel. I might have been in the indies: the sun shone relentlessly, causing me to shield my eyes. There was not a cloud in the sky, no gray in sight, and the blue was positively oppressive. Similarly, the obsidian color of the water was gone, replaced by water clear enough to see a man drown in. I hunched over the side of the boat, looking down into these depths, searching for something

(waiting)

but I don't know what. Whatever I was looking for, I'm sure it was not what did come out of the water. I saw it coming from a great distance, and for a reason that only my sleeping-self could answer, I awaited it eagerly and did not try to stop it or get out of the way. It burst from the water, making no splash, but shooting high into the air before landing on my lap. It was an old book and not just any old book, but Riven's book. The one he had flipped through incessantly during his stay in the cottage and which I had never seen when it was not on his person. The one he told me was full of charts. I reached my hand out to turn the cover, eager to see what the cyclops had been hiding from me, but before I had a chance the book reached for me.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Its pages were folding themselves in a rapid, unpleasant manner, warping their once uniform order into grasping tentacles that wrapped around my wrists, pulling me down down down. The book was trying to take me down to where it had come from, to the bottom of the clear channel under the perfect sky but I didn't want to go I didn't want to go... I woke up to a pounding on the cottage door, my forehead beaded with sweat. I reached for my walking stick and stumped to the door. It was, of course, Riven with my groceries. He held the bag out as if afraid it might bite him at any moment.

“Thank you, Riven.”

“Mr. Grady.”

He turned to go, the briefest possible interaction, as ever, good enough for him.

“Could you show me how to spruce up the cottage?”

“‘Scuse me?”

“I’m not sure how to grow things in this clime. The place is a bit gloomy, don’t you think?”

“Plannin on stayin long enough for all that are ya?”

“I just might.”

If Riven thought it was odd that I had chosen the moment I had been shot as the time to attach myself to the channel, he didn't show it. For the first time, I detected a hint of something from him that wasn't cold detachment or judgment. He genuinely loved the challenge of such a thing but didn't know if propriety allowed him to do it.

“I’ll think on it.”

“Thank you again, Riven. I’ll be around.”

“...”

“Bye now.”

It had not been my plan all along to ask Riven to come back by the cottage, in fact, I had only just gotten rid of him. I did not enjoy his company, but I desperately wanted to see what was in his book. Of all the burning questions on my mind, this seemed the one I could most probably answer. I was quite wrong, as I often am. The contents of the book were to be the very last thing I figured out during my time living on the channel. But I didn't know that yet. My dream hung about me for the rest of that day, making me useless as a writer except for copying down what I could remember. I wondered if the dream had subconsciously prompted me to ask Riven to help me garden. There was no way to tell, and to be honest, I've never been a very big fan of Freud. One thing I could tell with absolute certainty was that I did not want to go back to the world of my dream. It had shaken me. I feared sleeping like a child after his first nightmare. It had been too real, too wrong, and the transition between sleep and wakefulness had been too smooth. Had the knocking woken me up? It hadn't felt that way. One action had simply melted into the other, just the way time always does. I stayed awake as long as possible that night, brewing cup after cup of coffee, my eyes drooping while my heart hammered wildly. It was far from pleasant, but preferable to being dragged to the depths by a tentacular book. When I fell asleep I couldn't say, but I did not wake until the late afternoon the next day--the pounding rain my alarm clock.

I was comforted by the downpour. It was an effective harbinger of reality, a sure sign that I was in my cottage on the channel, the real channel.