Ambrose Nast

Nothing to be scared of.

Yet I, a boy utterly entranced by the sea, who yearned for the day I might volunteer to serve on the smallest clipper, had been given my first glimpse of something to fear out there.

I needn't have worried, though.

My sciatica would keep me on land forever, breaking my heart more so than my bones.

when my grandfather was withered away to almost nothing and lay in his deathbed, and often spoke to people who weren't there, including, to our great embarrassment, an Easton prostitute whose skills he had apparently been especially fond of, he contradicted himself on one point of the story he'd told me when I was a boy, speaking to the ceiling high above him just moments after he'd been brokenly reminiscing about his old schoolhouse.

Damned Dutchman's crept up port side, Eric, he whispered.

I had no idea who Eric was.

His stare had become stony.

He looked terrified.

Find Reynolds, and for Christ's sake, don't look in their eyes, he'd finished, and slipped away into a heavy sleep.

I recall it was only a few days later that he died.

A strange visual aberration manifested beneath my feet as I walked the shore road.

Clouds had moved over the moon, making my path much darker, yet I could see vividly the image of each individual footprint made before me, as if some artist had painted those images in multiple coats of tar.

Stopping to look more closely, I saw that while my own boots had left little evidence of their passage behind me, Van Delden's were so vivid as to seem not fully imprinted in the dust, but rather almost hovering a fraction of an inch above it.

I was afraid to reach out and touch one, and here was something even stranger.

The more I looked at them, the more they seemed to shift and displace almost imperceptibly, as if jostled by the ever-rising wind.

I found myself becoming mesmerized, dizzy.

When I returned to my senses, I knew at once that my command of time itself had suddenly been shaken, as one knows instinctively that one has overslept.

I pulled out my watch and was alarmed to see that it was almost eleven, when I knew the hour had not been nearly that late when I set out on the shore road.

I fully believed in that moment that, yes, the Dutchman had devised a way to infernally delay me just enough.