Ties

As the day slowly died I wandered back towards the harbor area, by now I was beyond fear, beyond trepidation, my legs worked of their own accord. I felt as if a hugely complicated clockwork device had been activated inside me and it would run until the spring had run down, there was no room for emotion or deep thinking, I simply moved along tracks on a pre-determined course.

And, where else would I end up but the quayside, looking over those dark, languid waters that ate the soul of men and swallowed secrets in their cold embrace.

For an indeterminate span of time I stood with my foot on a bollard, trying to look into those inky depths, to fathom out the mystery.

Then, a thought of revelatory power pierced my heart, shattering the clockwork like state of fugue I had been in. I saw that the bollard I stood by had a thick, hawser-laid rope running into the harbor. However, there was no obvious point where the rope resurfaced and ran to a boat. The rope simply penetrated the water and seemed to go straight down into those depths.

Hadn't old Mcintosh at the library said that the harbor had no definite depth, that the sludge and ooze from the River Tarn lent the seabed in the harbor an endless depth, one which no sounding line could ever bottom out on.

I staggered to the next bollard as this revelation took grip of my mind, sure enough a thick hawser dropped vertically into the water and could not be seen resurfacing. The next was the same and the next along. I looked across the harbor and counted no less than twenty three bollards with this thick hawser dropping straight down into that cursed abyss.

What might so many hawser be reaching to?

Then it struck me and I dropped to my knees and wept bitterly. For I knew where these hawsers terminated and I realized that I was powerless to do anything.