There are few sounds as unsettling as silence on the island of Hopeless, yet, on the night of our tale, it felt as if the sea had forgotten how to breathe. Pyralia Skant stood on the strand, her fingers tracing invisible sigils in the air. Each movement was a neat little erasure, like rubbing out old ink on parchment. A palimpsest in reverse, I suppose. Pyralia was, as ever, unmaking.
When the fog thickened for no discernible reason, everything about it screamed that this was not the ordinary kind of fog that shrouded Hopeless on a daily basis. This was more sinister; it had a sentience that Pyralia instinctively knew to be observing her. Seconds later, out of that fog emerged the tall, lean figure of a man who walked with a slow and deliberate grace that suggested he was in no hurry to arrive.
“Pyralia. Pyralia Skant?”
Pyralia slowly turned; her eyes narrowed.
“You’ve undone enough, Pyralia. It’s time to call a halt,” he said. His voice was quiet but oddly resonant, and reminded her of a bell being struck underwater.
“And you, I imagine, presume to stop me?”
“No. You need to stop yourself.”
He tilted his head slightly, studying her with something that might have been pity.
“Don’t you remember me?”
“Skakka” she whispered to herself, tasting the syllables on her tongue as something both alien and familiar. It was an old word, reaching out from the days when the Men of the North shared secrets with the sea.
“This island aches for equilibrium,” he said. “It is my duty to answer.”
His coat brushed the shingle and his eyes caught what little light there was. For an instant Pyralia thought she saw her own reflection there. And then he was gone, leaving nothing but the faint smell of salt and the lingering feeling of judgement.
For some minutes Pyralia stood stock still, as motionless as the rocks surrounding her.
“Ah, Skakka, I remember you now. There will be battles to come, no doubt,” she muttered into the breeze. “And I, for one, have no intention of giving in without a fight.”
Conventional wisdom tells us that it is only death and taxes that are inevitable. Hopeless, of course, turns this on its head. On the island taxes are non-existent, and death can sometimes be negotiable. What is inevitable, however, is that trusted friends will confide in each other. This is why Pyralia, for whom the concept of friendship was a novelty, told Philomena about Skakka, and Philomena later related the story to Rhys, Reggie and Tenzin. In The Squid and Teapot, news of a stranger arriving on Hopeless was unremarkable; when that stranger’s presence disturbed the usually implacable Pyralia Skant, however, something was decidedly amiss.
Reggie Upton had rummaged in the attics of The Squid countless times, fascinated by the bric-a-brac and dusty old books that others had found superfluous to their needs. It was during a recent spate of particularly inclement weather, rendering him house-bound, that it occurred to Reggie he could be usefully employed tidying things up and conferring some degree of order to the hundreds of books scattered around. And so he set out, with military precision, to organise the various volumes into separate piles for easy reference – history, fiction, geography, alchemy etc. On the face of it, this was not a complicated, or particularly interesting task, until, a few days following news of Pyralia’s visitor, he found a handwritten tome, bound in a greenish shade of eel skin. It was a book so begrimed with dust that it seemed to be upholstered in the stuff.
Gingerly he peered inside the cover. The title page, once coaxed into view with a careful puff, read:
‘The Shivering Chronicle, Being a Record of Certain Occurrences Unsuited to the Pulpit.
Compiled by Father Ambrose Honeywell.’
Reggie turned over the page.
‘I, Ambrose Honeywell, have undertaken what no prudent servant of Christ should: to sanctify the fog.
By candle and crucifix I gathered it, drop by ghostly drop, from the air itself, and it condensed upon the brass cross of St. Ursula, which wept steadily all through the night. I named the result Aqua Nebularis Sancta, the Sacred Cloud Water, and blessed it with trembling hands.
My intent was simple: to cast this holy distillation upon the sea, and thereby quiet whatever stirreth beneath.
I approached the tide, and into it I flung the holy water, God forgive me! The fog shuddered. Not parted, not fled, but recoiled like a living thing. The drops struck the waves and hissed. Then a shape arose, vast and thin, its face divided cleanly down the middle. One side was weeping, the other smiling.
“Balance,” it said, though no sound was made. “Balance and unbalance. I am both these things, priest. I am Skakka.”
I remember little after that, save the taste of salt and dust in equal measure, and a sense that something within me now is forever drawn toward the sea, as a needle is to the lodestone.’
Reggie, who had long since lost any sensible sense of caution, carried the book downstairs. As he descended, the lamps in the stairwell flared briefly, casting twin shadows of him, one to each side, as though the house couldn’t quite decide where he belonged.
In the snuggery Pyralia Skant had been deep in thought. This had been rudely interrupted by an angry bluebottle, which Pyralia quietly proceeded to unmake.
Reggie, barely able to conceal his excitement, burst into the room and placed the book on the table before her.
“I found this upstairs,” he said. “It crossed my mind that you might appreciate a spot of bedtime blasphemy.”
Pyralia brushed the cover clean with a fingertip; the air quivered. “Ah,” she said softly. “Honeywell. He was one of the few who nearly understood.”
Reggie raised an eyebrow. “Understood what?”
“That balance is not necessarily peace,” she murmured, eyes unfocused. “It is tension held politely.”
The room grew still. Even Drury, snoozing by the hearth, ceased rattling his vertebrae.
Pyralia turned a page and stopped. The illustration showed a tall, spectral figure bestriding the surf. One half of him was dark, the other luminous, and a set of scales dangled where a heart ought to be.
“Skakka,” she whispered, her voice reverent and wary at once. “So many years have passed. I had almost forgotten him.”
Reggie looked puzzled.
“You’ve encountered this Skakka chap before?”
Pyralia smiled, almost wistfully.
“Oh yes… aeons ago, when Atlantis disappeared beneath the waves. He interferes when the world lists too far.”
Reggie peered at the page.
“Well, if this is the blighter, he looks more like an accusation of guilt, if you ask me.”
Pyralia smiled thinly. “That’s precisely what he is.”
Then, as if to punctuate the moment, a bell sounded outside. It was not from the church, but from somewhere deep within the fog. Three notes only, uncertain in their harmony, as if testing which world they belonged to.
Pyralia closed the book. “And he’s back,” she said.
To be continued…
Authors note: According to the Cleasby & Vigfusson Old Norse to English dictionary, skakka means “to balance” and is used in phrases like skakka með e-m or skakka milli þeirra, which translate to “to interfere between fighters” or “to interfere between two combatants so as to decide the matter.” This suggests a sense of mediating or bringing equilibrium between opposing forces.