Wings of the Sea

a mysterious babysitter who changes everything

They lived in a beach house overlooking the ocean. In the summer time they lived there. The rest of the year they lived in some far away city, but it was in the summer when they came alive. When the colors were more vibrant and the salty air was easy to breathe. The husband and the wife stayed at home most of the time, sipping coffee and spending time on the beach. When they went out they would almost always take the child with them. They left the boy with a sitter for the first time at age five because they had to go back to the city to discuss important matters of business. The sitter’s name was Gretchen. She stood a tall and lovely figure with orange hair that streamed down her back, and he thought her eyes were like the ocean on the calmest of days. Serene, but sparkling with a hidden secret. It was stormy on the night parents left. The wind blew sand so harshly it burned when it hit the skin, and thunder rose from threatening clouds. He stood in his plaid pajamas with a mug of cocoa in hand and watched the young woman gaze out the window. “I do love a good thunderstorm.” She sighed, mystified as the tide came rolling in. And the hint of a smile formed on her face. For a moment she seemed to have forgotten the small boy and the house and everything around her, remaining entranced by the storm, wrapped in her own thoughts but she then came out of the state just as quickly as she had entered it. She turned around and bent down to face the boy. “Now then.” She said, friendlily, “You must be Noah.”

“Yes.” Noah answered.

“Good! Glad to hear your parents weren’t trying to trick me.” She laughed. He didn’t understand what was funny. “Now then, Noah. What do you suppose we should do for fun?”

 

They spent the evening baking chocolate chip cookies and listening to the old jazz records belonging to Noah’s parents. She hummed along softly to a piano piece that had a woman with a deep voice as the singer singing something about cows, but the sound was a bit scratchy so it could have been about something else. The rhythm picked up as it neared the chorus and then all at once it burst with a playful, merry tune you hear at carnivals. “Come on, let’s dance!” Exclaimed the sitter, and they waltzed around the kitchen together as the cookies were baking. She had to bend down because of how tall she was, especially to a little boy and they stumbled a few times, but they managed, and as the music flowed sweetly a good feeling spread all around the house.

 

The two of them became good friends very quickly. He told the sitter about his favorite book, which was about dinosaurs and had lots of colorful pictures. He told her about his mother and father, the playground near their house, the pictures he drew and of living in the city, which was very big and exciting. And he loved listening to the things Gretchen would tell him. At night she told stories that were unlike anything he’d ever heard. Words came alive out of her mouth like magic. She spun spooky tales of pirates from long ago who now haunted old ships and drove sailors mad with their whisperings. Mysterious islands that could not be found on any map, but held the finest riches in the world. The deepest, darkest part of the ocean that was home to both angelic sprites and terrible sea monsters that could rip you to pieces with their huge tentacles. And Noah loved it when they played pretend. They turned the living room into a prehistoric jungle, pretending to be dinosaurs that towered higher than any building in the city. Became mermaids and swam around the depths of the unknown part of the ocean. They were arctic explorers looking for things on the beach. They spent lots of time on the beach, finding pretty shells and sea glass and whatever else was brought in by the tide. Splashing as they ran through the shallow water, stargazing on the sand at night.

 

On Sunday night Noah couldn’t go to sleep, knowing his parents would be back on Monday and the nanny would leave, and also because she told a story that night he knew he would never forget. The kind of story that causes you to look at the world differently is all too real even though it has to have been made up. Such stories as these leave marks on the heart which are remembered with all their vivid intensity the moment before we die. Even when she began it, although he had no idea of what was to come he had the feeling this story was more important than the rest. It was the tone she used when she said ‘The greatest explorer of all time cannot be found in history books because of the way he died, and the way he did not die.’ All was quiet as he listened intently to the story about a man from centuries ago who sailed to the end of the world and back, and about the horrific things he saw there at the edge of the world. How he should have died because no man can ever see such things. And it was the end of that story, the very end which caused his heart to stop for a mere second. He lay awake for hours after. Unblinking, unfeeling.

 

Then at last she came to him, her face glowing in the light of her candle. She ran her fingers through his hair. “Close your eyes, boy. And sleep.” And then she sang. She sang beautifully. He didn’t understand the meaning of the words but in a deeper way he did understand. It felt like the sun, full and beaming over thrashing ocean waves.

 

‘Close your eyes and fall asleep,

As you sink into the deep.

            The cold will kiss your cheek, my dear,

            When you wake you will not fear,

            and if you wake you will not rise

            the last time you open your eyes.

            Wings of darkness, wings of the sea

            Will bring you sleep eternally.’

           

He didn’t know how long she sang, for what could have been a minute could have been an hour. It felt like no time passed and all of time was passing, but as the song continued it began to sound less like a song and increasingly more like ocean waves. When Noah awoke his parents stood over him worriedly. “Noah, darling.” His mother put a hand on his forehead. “It’s five in the afternoon, you’ve been asleep all day. Are you feeling alright?”

 

            Time began to pass and the sitter became more of a regular thing. The parents would go out for dinner or a movie by themselves to have a special ‘date night’ as they called it, and left Noah with Gretchen. He found each visit with his sitter to be quite a joyful one. At age six they spent the most time swimming and having campfires on the beach. At seven he learned how to play baseball and they played in the park together for practice. At nine his parents let them go places. They went for walks in forests and parts of the area Noah hadn’t been before. She took him sailing for the first time. At 10 Noah took on a passion for visual art. He would spend days in the basement painting things and when Gretchen came over they painted together. He would paint people and trees most often. Sometimes dinosaurs. And her paintings were as exquisite as they were otherworldly. All were in light pastel colors. Lots of blues and purples and greens. One featured a girl riding a dolphin across a black night full of stars. Another showed a fairy with black distorted wings and a skull of a face. “Why does everyone always have skulls instead of faces?” Noah asked.

            “Because they do not have faces, they are too old. Their faces have long fallen off. This is what they are now. Hollow bones made of rock and coral. They are all the same.”

           

            Noah wanted a sitter forever. That sitter forever. He had grown up with her, after all. She was like another parent or an older sister and he always wanted to be with her, but when he was twelve his parents decided enough was enough. The boy was old enough to be trusted on his own, and taking on more independent responsibilities would benefit him. Her services would no longer be needed. He sat in his room and cried for days. His parents went out and Gretchen came back for a final few hours.

            “I don’t want you to go.”

            “Hush now.” She gave a sad smile as they looked at each other. “You are growing older, and all things must come to an end.”

 

            That was the second night she sang her lullaby. It was the same hypnotizing rhythm, sending him waves of euphoria that gently put him into a deep, dreamless sleep. When he slowly came back into consciousness the first thing he noticed was an electronic humming. He opened his eyes, confused at how bright the room was. There were humming, bright lights that hung from the ceiling above him. Something thin and plastic was attached to his face, around underneath his nose, and he saw that the whole room was white. He made a soft, surprised noise that was just enough to startle his grief-stricken parents who had been sitting quietly at a table on the other side of the room. They rushed over to him. His mother burst into tears. “Oh Noah, Noah! Thank god!” Alarmed, he realized he was in a hospital room, in bed, attached to all these different wires and things. He didn’t like this. He wanted to get out of this place. “What… what happened?”

            It was his father who answered, in his matter-of-fact voice revealing no emotion. “You’re fifteen now, Noah. You’ve been in a coma for three years.”

 

            Noah changed after that. Once home from the hospital he retreated into himself and spent most days up in the attic, alone. He sat on the creaking dark wood floor in the coolness of the small place and stared out into nothingness. Every so often he spent days on end in his attic, and refused to come down even for supper. Once in a while he would open the window and allow himself to get lost in the sound of waves and the cool ocean breeze. He closed his eyes and remembered the sea there, with his head out the open window. The high tide drew him most to the window, for as it rose it seemed to be whispering death. Briefly a flood of childhood memories would come rushing back, but then he always stepped back, and closed the glass to remain in dark solitude once more. His parents grew ashamed of their peculiar son, who at the age of sixteen was still stuck at twelve, and struggled to process things which had once come so easily. He seemed to be growing backwards, for he was capable of less and less as time passed and then all at once, he was not a boy at all, but some long and bony creature who never spoke, and rarely ate from the plates of food they set out for him.

 

Dinner parties were the worst, for his parents grew ashamed of their peculiar son. When adults from the neighborhood would come in to feast on delicacies and cluck over the latest gossip they knew better than to call Noah down to be stared at and questioned by their guests. A woman named Sylvia had once made the mistake of opening the door to the attic when looking for the washroom. She peered in to the dark and smelly place and then saw the wide-eyed hollow face of a skeleton child who lay crouching on the floor peering up at her. And his haunting gaze disturbed a part of her that had long been sleeping. She gasped and shut the door ever so quickly, and to this day she has never said a word about it. Sometimes people would ask about him. “What ever happened to that lovely little boy of yours? Has he gone away somewhere?” “I thought he came home from the hospital. Has he fallen into another coma?” Gossip spread like a virus around the town and soon everyone was talking about the queer boy who came home from the hospital. “He used to be a pupil of mine.” Said Ms. Lisa, who taught at the schoolhouse. “Always very bright and happy. It’s quite tragic what happened to him. I suppose he never quite recovered from it, and they don’t say much about it either, the poor family. He must be in an awful state.” “They are very secretive, that family aren’t they. Do you suppose he died?” Said Anne Hathaway who worked at the bakery. “No, no.” said another one of the townsfolk. “I’ve seen him before, peering out the window. He hasn’t been eating much that’s for sure, with his face and eyes all sunken in like that. Do you suppose they’ve locked him up in there as punishment?”

“Punishment for what?”

“I heard” another lady chimed in “That the child went crazy and they had to lock him up in the attic so he wouldn’t kill them both.”

“How awful.”

“How frightening. There is something the most unsettling about those folks. I’d stay away from the house if I were you.”

“Last night I think I heard him crying.”

 

Once the gossip came back to dark wooden beach house, the couple decided they must put an end to it. Something had to be done. They bolted the attic window shut and announced their son had died. In a way he really had died, for his illness was a form of death in itself. A death of the mind while the body lived on to carry it’s mangled remains like a zombie. Noah could make sense of little that was going on, but he knew one thing. His parents did not want him anymore. At the age of 24 had nightmares in which bony hands were pulling him forward into the rolling sea that was ready to devour him. He threw horrible fits and stopped eating all together. Then one night he became very peaceful. An unsettling quietness spread throughout the house, like the calm before a storm. And he gently rocked himself as he smiled and hummed an old tune he had forgotten for so many years.  ‘Close your eyes and fall asleep.’ The tune repeated in his head, in the voice of someone else. A voice that was ever so sweet and very familiar. And as the last line ended he fell to the floor in a blissful sleep.

 

                                    *          *          *

 

He awakes to the murky smell of earthworms and rotting moss. A jolt of terror runs all through his body. His hands have been tied around his back and there is so much dirt on top of him he can barely see, and what he can see is only slivers of pitch darkness. His shirt is soaking wet with something, and it takes him a moment to realize he is drenched in his own blood. He tries to scream but there isn’t enough air to breathe properly, let alone make any kind of sound. The weight of the ground grows heavier on his chest until it feels like a million pounds, breaking his bones, crushing his ribs. He has been asleep for far too long. Did his heart really stop? Was he in such a deep sleep that he actually died or did everyone just think he had died? And if so how long has he been dead for? A horrible thought passes through his mind. What if they buried him alive on purpose? There is so much pain he cannot think for much longer. But there is a moment of clarity before everything goes black. A moment where he is free and the end of an old story comes back to him like the reoccurrence of a vivid dream. ‘The love of a mermaid allowed him to live. The unbreakable oath she had dared to break sentenced her to eternal agony. And now she roams the dying earth, a monster searching for victims to madden with her ever charming beauty. And each one will die in her clutches, and come back to the sea to be feasted upon. He was the first. And you will be next.”