Marine literature has elevated many. It gave Conrad popularity, Verne - wealth. Thousands were, and are, enraptured with tales of naval stories. Who has not heard of Crusoe’s predicament or Tuan Jim’s disaster of Padna? Truth be told, I’m scared of the deep blue. My teachers evoked the journey to Congo with pathos and remembered Phileas Fogg’s rash return on Henrietta with exhilaration. Meanwhile, I looked idly at these books, the grey cogs of my brain trying to understand these characters. I understand you’d be perfectly surprised if I told you my studies took place at a naval school. I’m a first officer on the 'Pope Lucas' by now. It was as jaw-dropping for me as it is for you, someone who about my character knows only this little facet that is my “thalassophobia”. I avoid horizons, nights and leaving the quarterdeck, as impossible as it is with my profession. I look down at my feet, I imagine complex riddles, feverishly try to engage someone in conversation. Generally, by the end of a fare, I feel almost liberated, free of terror’s shackles, almost used to the sway of the ship and distance of land. But as soon as we walk aboard again, that fear returns.

The tale I wished to bring up happened around August. We had been at open sea for weeks by then, bringing opportune passengers and bulk cargo of cotton across the ocean. Unfortunate meteorology and cruel chance brought upon us several days of storms to endure and avoid. Fleeing maelstroms brought us far from our originally intended course. Terrible delay mounted. Captain Bourdain looked at calendars only with worry. His financial situation was none of my concern, but the crew knew he was struggling greatly recently. And this one was a major transport. If we were too late, if the Company terminated our contract prematurely, all that cotton… Well. It’d be the captain that would have the most trouble. It’s easy for a hard-working sailor to find work.

Perhaps it’s that creeping desperation that subconsciously caused us to alter course in tandem further. Or maybe it happened on our rectified, correct tract? My memories begin to muddle when I attempt to think back to those specific days. No wonder. The things… Fantastical, if anything.

It was night. Cold, windy, but clear. There was no cloud to count on the sky. I looked up. Staring any lower would confront me with the endlessness of the waters around us. But the boundless sky - that, somehow, I endured with fascination. Once, I purchased a small booklet on astrology. I never believed in this spiritual drivel, but I enjoyed daydreaming about celestial meanings. Perhaps I hoped I’d believe. It’d be comforting to look up at the starry sky and know: here is my past. My present. Here I can write my future. And they will remember.

One of our passengers approached me. Lady Rapaccini, if I recall correctly. No. It sounds so ridiculous that name must’ve intruded upon my thoughts after a heavy lecture of Hawthorne, perhaps. Madame “Rapaccini” travelled with her boisterous uncle. The two were entirely different. She - a dreamer. Insomniac. She often climbed onto the main deck in the middle of the night, staring into the absent distance. Once, I told her about my fear. Her expression was unchanged throughout our conversation. Then she told me of hers. How many phobias a young mind could keep! I didn’t incline for the conversation to go in that direction, but I couldn’t stop her. I felt like she needed that, perhaps.

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And her uncle, Molinari - a stereotypical man of his calibre. Really, I can find few words that describe how irrelevant he is to the tale at hand.

Rapaccini looked up alongside me. Then she lowered her gaze. I saw it with a corner of my eye. Her stare lingered on something distant. Curiosity got the better of my fear, that time. I looked at the horizon. Where black water met blacker skies. Where the two commingled in a gloomy wall, obscuring all the horrors both are known for, all the screams of drowning, the inglorious falls, the endless waves, sweeping you under…

No. Not then. The moon’s fading crescent was to my left, and yet - in front of me, several miles away from 'Pope Lucas', the water was white. Pale white. Fighting with innate disgust within me, I looked at the stain with curiosity. Perhaps it was my imagination, midnight phantoms toying with perception, but I could swear it gleamed and twinkled in all this absence of light. We stood there staring wordlessly. That night I dreamt of her leaping from the ship into the dark waters, swimming towards that light. I woke up drenched in sweat.

The next night called me to the main deck again. Clouds obscured the moon. It was cold and windy. Rapaccini joined me later. And we saw it again. The ship moved tremendously that day, and the pool of white water seemed to have moved with us. As I gazed at it, it looked like something wriggling beneath the water’s surface. Something shiny, something pale, something great. Like a thousand phosphorescent snakes pooling together in a bestial knot.

It’s hard to say what happened exactly. I recall seeing that enigmatic presence many times more, yet it was impossible - our journey lasted only a few days more. And it seems Rapaccini’s face in my memory slowly moulds into the faces of many other people from that cruise. Captain Bourdain. Kirksmouth, the terse helmsman. Stangret, a youthful midshipman.

But there’s one thing I remember well.

Perhaps it was my fascination with the otherworldly. Perhaps it was the dreams. Yes, there were many. Of drowning in that white stain. I was always scared of great waters - but that one… In these squalid reveries, it looked almost inviting. I woke up sweating. Sometimes, screaming. One day I convinced myself Rapaccini really leapt. I paced the main deck in fever, looked bashful around Molinari. Then I saw her, and came to my senses. I couldn’t understand how such a small thing completely changed me for these few days. It’s as if some deep emotions, doubts, fears suddenly surfaced, jolted out of my heart through the veins and neurons straight into the mind, causing discreet, yet gruesome, havoc.

Yes. I jumped. It was fever. Impulse. Dream! My body sprang in sickly temperatures. I felt the white coil around me. How soothing it was, yet so disgusting! Placebo? Reality? I felt the snakes. Yes, I did! Coiling, suffocating, wrapping around every limb… Liberating… “Liberating” is the only word I can use to describe that feeling, somehow. It was ecstatic, yet obscene. Revealing, fulfilling, yet as repulsive as… The water around me.

I don’t know what became of 'Pope Lucas' to be quite frank with you. I’m not that first officer. Not anymore, perhaps. These bedraggled lips never opened since those screams. This greyish-pale skin didn’t walk. It lies sloughed off from its soul on a rocky coast, somewhere on the ocean’s western fringes. 

Only these absent eyes remain. Always looking upwards. Never at the horizon.