The Windmill Man

By Geoffrey Gaskill.

The windmill man haunted Stanley. He didn’t know his name. He’d never seen him before. He never saw him after. But became more real than his father.

The windmill man had fallen. It was kind of symbolic when he thought about it and understood such things. The fall was his fall. The fall of man.

But it wasn’t that he’d fallen that haunted Stanley, it was the way he fell. Young as he was, Stanley recognised death-in-motion when he saw it. The call of the other. It was a clean fall. The man had turned head over heels, arms and legs outspread looking for all the world like the sails of a windmill.

When he hit the water he vanished as though he’d never been at all. Like the fog and smoke on the water around the ship, it swallowed him body and soul. It was that obliteration, so quick, so final, that terrified Stanley.

His parents had disappeared a while before the windmill man’s fall. Like him, they ceased to be. No goodbye, no explanation or apology. Stanley saw it as a betrayal he could neither forget nor forgive.

Later on his doctor said the windmill man represented his mother. ‘You saw him fall. You imagined it was her.’

The last time he saw his mother she’d told him she and his father were going out on deck. ‘For a moment. To find out what’s going on.’

‘So we’ll be prepared. Like the Boy Scouts,’ his father had added.

Stanley wasn’t happy but snuggled under the blankets.

‘Well, then,’ his mother said as she kissed him goodnight.

‘We’ll leave the lights on,’ his father added. ‘And when we get back, we’ll read a story.’

The farting of the ship’s horn blasted Stanley into the wakefulness of the empty cabin. Deep in his heart he knew something was wrong even before his parents had left. It was the middle of the night, in the middle of the ocean and the ship had stopped. Young as he was, he knew ships weren’t supposed to stop in the middle of the ocean for no reason. Then there had been that frightful grinding noise.

When he got out of bed – ‘bunk,’ his father had called it when they’d come aboard – there was a definite lean to the floor. At once, the ship seemed to want to tip him out and the night was calling to him.

In the distance he could hear voices. Incoherent and loud. Panicky.

Outside his cabin the cold grabbed at his ankles and massaged his legs in a not-nice way. His pyjamas weren’t going to keep him warm enough. If he was going to go up on deck he’d have to get dressed. ‘Rug up.’ It was his mother’s mantra. ‘You know you catch cold.’

In the corridor people were running. Uphill. The whole ship it seemed was tilted upwards.

The first thing he saw as he came on deck was a kraken of ice and snow. It was merging into the blackness beyond the lights of the ship. A monster from the deep, skulking back to its world of shadows. It terrified him beyond words even as he felt its voice in his head. ‘Come,’ it murmured, ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

He shook off the thought and called for his parents but all he could see were crowds struggling along the tilting deck. Upwards, always upwards. Some slipped and slid back in a real-life game of snakes and ladders. From the bowels of the ship he heard the sound of rushing water as if someone had opened up a giant tap.

The angle of the deck seemed to grow steeper with every step and he had trouble with people bumping him out of the way. He called for his mother. He wanted to be back in his bunk. He wanted to be warm. Despite the clothes he’d put on, impish fingers poked between the layers of his clothes, letting in the cold.

Suddenly there was a whoosh as something shot into the sky. A skyrocket, like the ones he’d seen on bonfire night, blazed a trail behind it and arced upwards before bursting into a riot of sparkling colours that lit up and curtained down on the scene around him.

Out on the water, beyond the ship, he could see small boats lolling beside ghostly children of the ice-mountain.

The front of the ship – the ‘bow’ his father called it – was now out of the water like a dog nosing and sniffing the frigid air.

Stanley wanted to go back to the cabin. He would find his mother there, he was sure. She would make him a warm drink like she did at home. Then he could sleep and tomorrow he’d tell her of his nightmare.

But this wasn’t a nightmare and his mother and his father were gone. He was alone in a crowd that screamed and shouted and struggled to move upwards – to the nose … the bow … of the ship.

It was at that moment he saw him. The windmill man.

Like a king he stood on that highest point of the ship. On the very nose. He held onto the railing. Even from this distance Stanley could sense, his terror. He could imagine the look in his eyes, the knotting in his guts. It was what he had felt the day he’d climbed a tree and then couldn’t get down. He’d clung to the branches and screamed, impotent to move.

The man clinging to the railing was dressed in black. He looked like his father looked when he and his mother went out on what they called a ‘dinner engagement.’ On those occasions his father looked more than dignified. He looked like a king. Stanley wanted to look like that. A king of the world!

But the man on the nose didn’t look like the king of the world even if he was dressed like one and stood above everyone else. Instead he was screaming. Kings, Stanley was sure, didn’t do that. He couldn’t hear the exact words but he knew what they were. They were what he’d been screaming up in that tree. Men, real men and kings, weren’t supposed to scream. They weren’t supposed to be afraid. His father wouldn’t be afraid.

He wanted – he needed – his father now.

Suddenly a hand grasped his arm. ‘Come with me,’ a voice, hard and urgent, said to him.

He looked around. It was a sailor. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘We’ll get you into one of the lifeboats.’

Stanley screamed. He didn’t know this man even if he was a sailor. He wanted his mother or his father. They’d know what to do. ‘I want my mother!’ Stanley wailed.

‘Come with me,’ the sailor told him, ‘and we’ll find her.’

Stanley tore himself free and turned ready to run, run to …

Where?

The king of the world! He would know what to do.

Instead he saw the king of the world no more than dangling now from a rail like a hanged man. He wasn’t a king after all. He was just a frightened man. Like he had been a frightened boy. A moment later the king fell.

Had he let go on purpose? Or had his hands slipped? Whichever it was, the effect was the same. The man drifted in slow motion, his head falling towards his feet, his feet falling upwards towards his head, his arms and legs outstretched.

Stanley knew that was the way he would have fallen from the tree if his father had not rescued him. He too felt his hands slipping a moment before his father grabbed him and folded him in his arms. ‘Safe and sound,’ he’d said.

But there was no one to catch the falling man. To make him safe or sound. With increasing speed he windmilled his way from that bow towards the black water, cold and dark, flat, oily, evil-looking.

The sea was calling him home and he disappeared with nothing more than a soundless white bloom amid the screams of the crowds. No one, except Stanley, noticed his fall.

The king disappeared just as his parents had disappeared.

Abandonment. It hovered over the water, a ghostly miasma somewhere beyond life. Stanley’s legs gave way. He might have fallen like the windmill man if the sailor had not scooped him up like the rag doll he was and bundled him into a lifeboat. He fainted.

He sensed the blackness as it consumed him. The coldness of the water penetrated the lifeboat and covered him like a blanket. In the distance he heard the call of the retreating ice mountain. It felt so … soothing. Like sleep.

The windmill man, the once and future king of the world, had disappeared. Like his parents.

In his dreams, Stanley the mountain embrace him. It would never abandon him. That was something.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Geoff spent thirty something years of his working life telling children how to write.

At retirement he decided to practise what he preached. Much of this output sits in his top drawer at varying stages of ‘completion’.

Otherwise he is an actor and director in the local theatre scene. After all, actors and directors are storytellers too.