Something for October, written one morning a few weeks ago while procrastinating.

It is the good fortune of so many wicked men to lack superstition, but not old Silas Barley. They reminded him, every last one of them—they laughed at his white cats, six to ward off every single black one that dared cross his path. They mocked his seven pewter crucifixes that weighed down his neck, and that he refused to enter the Throttled Rat, though his friends pleaded with promises of free rounds, all because there were thirteen steps leading up to its door, a fact none noticed but old Silas.

They would not laugh, he told himself, if they were pulling oars with me now, for he was a mile from the harbor at Beggar’s End, the lighthouse west of his open boat blazing its twisting beam through the fog, but failing to penetrate what had settled before him. Why did there always have to be a sea-fog on the thirteenth of October, year after year after year? He listened past the sloshing of the water against the wooden vessel, listened past the creaking of the oarlocks, listened, as best he could, out through that murk that not even the lighthouse could break. Finally he came to a small black mound that rose out of the night tide, nothing more than a square rock, barnacled below the waterline, and streaked with white seagull droppings above it. Was it mere luck that he found it every year, this rock that was nearly invisible in the nighttime? That’s what the men of the Throttled Rat would say. Coincidence. As though nothing in this world were fated, and everything before you were visible.

He pulled up his oars and let his boat drift, rising and falling upon the mild waves, and for a brief moment the fog seemed to form a clearing about old Silas and that putrid little landmark that he sought every thirteenth of October. He waited, his ears turned eastward, and then he leaned over the bulwark and pointed one ear at the water, so close the black waters kissed him. A quarter hour he waited, until he reckoned it was about midnight, and so he called out, straight down at the sea, “Mr. Elias Bonden! You still dead?”

If the fog had indeed cleared, it now pulled about him as tight as his buttoned black coat. He could feel it in his lungs, filling him like smoke, and the rock before him seemed to vanish as the fog rolled over it; he could hardly see anything but the vessel below him. An electricity seemed to shiver through the air, up the keel, into his coat, up his arms, and the hairs stiffened upon them, and on the back of his neck, and even upon his chest. But he’d expected all this.

There came a voice from the deep that seemed to be drawn up and through that static charge, up through the keel, into his coat, into his chest, pressing upon his heart. The voice said, “It is a torment down here, Silas Barley. It is deep and dark and cold. Why did you do it, Silas Barley? Why would you crush a man’s skull as he departed a happy evening at the Throttled Rat, and then dump him into the sea? We were friends, were we not? Oh, but it is a torment down here…”

“Fine,” said Silas, and he pushed the paddles back into the black water. “We will speak again in a year.”

So he rowed back to Beggar’s End, where they could still have their laughs at this superstitious old fool.