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  Steve was sure the tub of lard hadn’t washed his own hands since he got on this trip. How dare he look down his sweaty nose at him, hangover or not? Although, he knew from vast experience that his hangovers were not a pretty sight.

  He took a moment to visualize himself pouring his coffee over ‘le fat chef’ but soon lost the mental energy. Instead, he was left feeling weak and generally sorry for himself, with only the ghosts of a self-confident identity for company.

  As he pondered his self-inflicted sickness and the consternation caused by last night’s card game, a voice disturbed his inner thoughts.

  “Hi there, Mr. Staples!”

  It was Dan Giles, the ship’s resident junior geologist and generally happy bugger, calling out to him as he walked across the helipad.

  “Are you enjoying the dawn?” he asked, his face already lit with a ready smile. “It’s quite something, don’t you think?”

  Dan was blue-eyed, well-spoken, and big enough to give you pause for thought. All topped off with a modest and easy manner. A man whom Steve wanted to resent for his good fortune but couldn’t. He could see the man’s genuine warmth in a soft, almost imperceptible, amber radiance. Dan’s head and shoulders were shrouded in a delicate vivacity of light, which Steve had seen and trusted before.

  The subtle radiance reminded him of his aunt in her purple dress, imbued with the none-too-subtle aroma of joss sticks and that warm glow. She was the one who’d first mentioned the word ‘aura’ to him, like a shared secret wisdom, in a room filled with glass and pottery angels, and who’d shared the same gentle luminosity of colors that Dan emanated. Perhaps, despite his customary aloofness , it was why Steve had begun talking to the man so soon after they’d met.

  He was instantly drawn to the genuine friendliness he saw and the easy companionship on offer. It left him torn between the inner distance he tried to keep from people and his own desperate need for friendship, all of which only seemed to increase his inner confusion.

  Waiting briefly for an answer that didn’t follow, Dan continued talking.

  “It’s strange, the change between the dark of night and the dawn of the day,” he mused aloud and then looked earnestly into Steve’s eyes.

  “The time when one changes to the other, it’s primal, like we’re at the beginning of everything, feeling the world begin again all around us. Or maybe we realize the fragile nature of our existence, having survived the cold of the night, shivering in the dark and waiting for the dawn?”

  With the delicate state of his stomach and the ache behind his eyes, Steve certainly felt fragile.

  “I don’t know,” Steve said. “It’s bloody cold enough, though.” And Dan laughed as if they had shared a great joke together.

  Bemused and strangely unsettled by Dan’s words, as if they were a warning or explanation of something he couldn’t quite understand, he wanted to ask for an explanation, to try and share in this revelation, but that something inside him like a barrier in his chest held him back as it always did.

  The long-distant sound of his mother’s voice was wise and patient in his memory. “The sensible voice is the one that listens before it speaks.”

  He remembered her soft voice and kind smile, and for a moment his defenses were down as the memory of her kindheartedness flooded him; tears sprang to his eyes, and he clung desperately to the railing. Then, the rawness of another memory of his mother, this one painfully dark, sprung up, and his emotional shutters slammed shut. He glanced quickly to see if Dan had caught his momentary weakness, but Dan’s eyes were out to sea, on the rising dawn.

  “It’s just another crappy day in paradise, Dan, and this coffee proves it,” he managed weakly.

  He raised his half-empty cup, grimaced, and mimed a gag, hoping his voice was steady.

  Dan smiled a golden-brown gentleness, and Steve’s inner barrier was again shaken.

  “Well, Steve, we may not have great coffee, but we have some view,” Dan mused, returning his gaze to the sunrise.

  Steve was suddenly saddened by the feeling he was missing a connection, a sharing of something important, and he understood that the failure was in him. He brooded on his hangover again and wished that he had the courage to open up his feelings, to finally share his inner thoughts with his companion. But all he could do was watch Dan from the corner of his eye, searching for (and not finding) a way past the silence of his solitude to share his well of emotions with the other man.

  He heard a familiar childhood chant in his mind: ‘Freaky weirdo, with a strange hairdo.’

  Still unanswered, Dan gently shrugged off the quiet and said in a benevolent voice, as if he were accepting Steve’s failings, “Perhaps, it is that the dawn’s fragile light gives us hope, after the fears of the dark night.”

  Quickly brightening, he said, “Well, enjoy the new sun and a beautiful day. I will see you later, Steve. I’ve got to make a call home to say goodnight to the kids.”

  Steve watched him leave with sleep-grimed eyes that unexpectedly seemed a little blurry. “Yeah, I will see you later …”

  And Dan strode away.

  “Oh, marvelous,” he admonished himself about his useless interaction with his friendly conversationalist. “Very well done.”

  The undemanding and friendly Dan had left him feeling aggravated and remote. He was a little disappointed that Dan hadn’t the time to reverentially talk about his family; he enjoyed the feeling he got when Dan described them, a tingle of gladness, as if the children were laughing somewhere close by.

  He kept seeking the man’s presence—he desired the warmth he felt in Dan’s company—but like a wise old moth he feared the flame. In his heart he envied the easy nature of the man, and it left his inability to risk exposing his secret a nagging irritation.

  He looked down over the walkway bars again, to the water’s surface beneath him, and in a fit of annoyance dropped the half-full polystyrene cup of ‘le fat chef’ coffee. The cup smacked against a pipe, spraying its contents out over the oil rig’s inner framework. The random act of vandalism dismissed his thoughts of Dan but opened the doorway for his trepidation about last night to return. He kicked a walkway post with a steel-toe-capped rigger boot for good measure and was pleased by the solid thud and subsequent thrumming vibration, but his physical display was also rewarded by a sudden wave of nausea.

  He quickly went down two levels, nervously looking around the accommodation levels, white corrugated metal rectangles piled like huge Lego bricks on one side of the platform. With the operations and science blocks they were piled the same, but in red and green on two of the sides. The last side of the rig’s metal-framed square held the cranes and helipad substructure.

  Jogging up the walkway toward his cabin, he began to feel relief loosen his knotted insides. He’d made it without running into the source of his anxiety, but when he turned the last corner to his cabin, he found it waiting for him with a stomach-turning grin.

  The large beefy frame of Lee Jones turned toward him with a fake welcome on his large fleshy face. Behind him like a smirking wolf was Brainy Michaels, who was the rangy opposite of the big, brawny Lee Jones. Brainy radiated oddly mixed yellows and reds in his aura, shades too confusing for him to interpret, unlike those of Lee Jones.

  “Hello, Stevie, mate. Was just coming to check how you were feeling. Just wanted to make sure you hadn’t forgotten about the money you owe me from last night.”

  He drawled around a replay of his toothy grin, while putting a chunky hand on Steve’s shoulder in an uncomfortable imitation of friendship.

  Steve sensed a void of compassion that hovered in Lee’s aura, like a black lake of spite behind his façade of charm; it leaked a radiance of dark, gangrenous greens.

  “Mind you, you could always try and win again tonight, if you feel a bit luckier?” Lee continued with his act of good-natured banter, but it was colorless and without friendship.

  Steve’s stomach dropped, and his mouth went dry. He had lost every penny he had
to Lee last night.

  He’d always been good at cards, had always seen in the shifts of their surrounding radiance when the other players had strong or weak cards, when someone else wasn’t confident in the card they played or was just plain bluffing. But last evening in the hot and oppressive atmosphere of the canteen, when he was faced with Lee’s smiling antipathy, he needed lager just to get through the experience, and his gambling edge had vanished in its haze.

  He was caught as always between his need for acceptance and being the person he felt himself to be inside, while never finding a place of contentment between the two.

  “Er, yeah, sure, Lee, of course I can … You can give me a chance to win it all back, mate?” he asked, his voice sounding too high and anxious.

  Lee’s grin became even wider.

  “No problem, Stevie. I wouldn’t want you to go ashore with nothing. Or without feeling you’d paid your debts, mate.” His tone was jovial, but a cutting edge hid beneath his easy tone.

  Lee laughed and Brainy joined in. Steve felt a wave of cold wash through his bowels that settled like ice in his stomach. When they had left, he went to a metal toilet cubicle, locked himself in and waited till his guts unclenched and the shaking in his legs subsided. The worst was his knowing that he’d have to try and win tonight, or he would be broke and would have only his home, his mother’s old flat, left to pay off his debt.

  Dan retreated from yet another perplexing conversation with the enigmatic and dark Steve Staples that left him frustrated. They had been coming across each other on the helideck since Dan first arrived six weeks ago. He felt that the roughneck man, though mostly quiet, was more than he seemed to be. In between silences he let slip moments of humour and intelligent insight that tantalized Dan’s interest. Unlike the man on deck today, Steve usually seemed to have an innate ability to catch whatever mood Dan was in.

  It may be that he wanted to see more in Steve than was there, because of his lack of common ground with his management colleagues. Dan had expected, with his university background, to be welcomed as one of their own, but the management had turned out to be a mixture of arrogance, ignorance, and overbearing self-importance.

  Maybe he just missed the camaraderie of student life. He’d not located one person with a shared interest or a desire to discuss anything beyond the work the rig carried out, football, cards, and TV and action films.

  He arrived at his cabin still pondering the strange yet enigmatic character he had begun to think of as a companion and went straight to his desk, picking up where he had left off in his latest letter to his wife. Due to his boredom and social seclusion, the letter was reaching epic proportions.

  He told her more stories of his boss and head of geology, John Lawson, or ‘School Bully’ as he nicknamed him, trying to imagine her smile as he wrote about the man’s ‘egg in a nest’ balding head.

  He found himself telling her about the ‘Mud Engineer’ Steve and one of his acerbic one-liners about the roughneck crew all being Planet of the Apes extras. He chuckled a little to himself as he wrote.

  He described their conversations quite often, and he hoped his latest descriptions of everything and everyone on the platform would not make her as bemused or perplexed as he felt.

  He turned to look at the picture on the wall of his kids and his wife, Lilly; her delicate features lit by the brilliant perfection of her smile stopped him in his tracks and made his chest ache, as he wondered for the millionth time why someone so beautiful and amazing would love somebody as average as himself.

  He sat on the edge of his bunk looking at the clock, knowing it would be an hour till he could call and say good night to the kids, as he waited on this heap of metal in the middle of the ocean, missing everything that mattered to him. He wondered again if the money was worth what he’d left behind.

  Thinking once more of the kids, he set about drawing another picture for Arron, who shared his love of drawing. He fancied himself a half-decent artist, and he started a picture of a wild-haired man standing on a raised metal area, gripping a railing with one hand and pointing out to sea with the other; behind him a storm was coming in.

  Hundreds of miles away and as deep as seven Grand Canyons, in the Puerto Rico Trench, at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean’s reach, a being the length of a blue whale and twice its width rose like an ethereal shadow from the pitch black deep.

  Its upper surface the dark of night, its underside lightened like the sunlit shallows far above, its colouring camouflaged it from above and below.

  It stretched its senses wide, seeking for prey and danger alike, till its awareness covered miles of open ocean water, all monitored by its cold, calculating intelligence.

  A being with a name that we would understand as Agrushell accelerated effortlessly while water surged over his outer shell, flowing with frictionless ease around the fractal perfection of his shape. Thrusting like a spearhead through the water toward an unsuspecting giant squid, Agrushell was a dark disguised shape with infinite power and the prowess for fatality.

  Before his prey had opportunity to evade, a dull electrical thud resonated through the water, leaving the squid stunned. Suctioned coils gripped and newly formed blades entered like a clamp, till blackness was all that remained of the squid’s final moments.

  When the pleasure of the kill had been savoured, and his hunger sated, Agrushell began to feel a different kind of hunger, a yearning toward the cold waters of the north—the calling to where the females of his kind lay on the seabed in ancient hibernation, waiting for the time of awakening, breeding, death, and renewal.

  Streamlining his shape to maximize his speed, he began accelerating like an underwater jet to the north east, toward the oil fields of the North Sea.

  Agrushell is available from Amazon here