Ship and Sighting

She calls to me, raising paths of desire like a labyrinth, but he who chases is lost.

Jan 30, 2025

In the weeks to come, I’ll begin presenting all my fiction on Literary Salon, and here I offer this first short story, written as an effort to learn from our recent explorations of style.

If you want to support what I’m doing:

Subscription Specials

Ship and Sighting

The original pages are splattered with the author’s blood, the journal having fallen from his grasp, arterial spray bright-blood-bleeding between the letters and the fibers of each page, obscuring his sickly-sweet certainty that their love would never die, but death came for Preston Hughes, long-time producer and stalwart friend. Left for me to find. First the journal. Then the man. A man whose secrets those pages can no longer keep.

Masculine and leather-bound, the journal is fit for a sea captain’s great, white wanting, when but for the breadth of one whale’s fluke, all the sea’s a wasteland: but he who chases is lost.

At our lunches, the food abandoned and the conversation forgotten whenever the muse moved him, Preston kept the journal by his plate. Lights glared off his bald spot as he bent low enough to smell each page’s must, his pen etching neatly printed letters with uniform spacing. Obsessively neat.

“You’ll have to introduce me.”

That introduction never came.

Preston’s pursuit was a woman. A woman he called her, a girl of nineteen by one telling. By another, she’d been nineteen for the decade he’d fought for (and ferried through development hell) his dream project, film as both ship and sighting: Dracula’s sequel, The Bloofer Lady; the title’s lady, that poor, dead Lucy Westenra.

Ship and sighting. Those were his words, often repeated, and though unexplained, I understood them well enough; sighting because the young object of his affection became the Lucy Westenra of his imagination, one born less of Stoker’s book than Coppola’s movie; ship because it would bring man and muse together in some never articulated fashion.

They shot little of the film before his death, and the footage is disappointing. I visited the set in those hopeful, expectant days, a location doubling for the interior of Hillingham where Lord Godalming keeps his vampiric Lucy. Preston guided me through Lucy's bedroom, which Godalming modifies into a cell, and as Preston talked he gestured, his hand still grasping the journal as if it were the wand from which movie magic sprung.

“He believes he’s keeping her satisfied on transfusions of his own blood.” Preston pointed to the crucifixes and garlic hung outside the windows. “He stays with her each night, but each day she escapes to the streets of London, joining the growing number of prostitutes who meet the needs of servicemen on leave.”

Outside that window, the Great War rages. Over twenty years have passed since Arthur and Lucy’s engagement, and Arthur, Lord Godalming is in his fifties while Lucy’s remains remain forever nineteen.

LUCY (wanton in white lace)
Come to me, that I may taste your longing and know all that God forbids honorable, onanistic men.

I’d read little of Preston’s script before that day. I knew less of his muse or the strange desires his neat, little letters spelled. By week’s end, that would change with the bloodied journal at my door, face up in the courtyard, bordered by bloodied footprints that came out of the grass, up the brick steps and through the front door, ending on the white tile of my foyer.

Men’s shoes–or a man’s size–with a tread that struck familiar. I called and received no answer. The police say I should have phoned them, but I drove to the Hillingham house and found Preston in Lucy’s bed, his throat slit open.

To all the gossipy theorists and conspiracy mongers: if it were as you proclaim, the vampire wasted its meal on white linen.

I called the police and sat with the journal to read what could be read. Fingerprints! they’d cry. Restoration has revealed more of the text but not all, leaving far too much a mystery.

She calls to me, raising paths of desire like a labyrinth, but he who chases is lost.

Today, I meet her, Preston’s muse. She joins me for lunch at the Burbank bistro where Preston and I once ate–her choice, unprompted. I haven’t been back since the killing and still see him neatly lettering, his bald spot shining, forever in his forties while I continue, age to age. His muse looks nearly forty, and a quick mental math says she could have been nineteen when they met. A tanned brunette and strikingly familiar, she calls herself Abigail Thorne.

“You're publishing the journal?”

“How can I be sure you are who you say?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Should I?”

She pulls out stationary, written in that same meticulous hand:

As both ship and sighting, the film shall deliver us together if my navigator holds. Speak on my chattering muse. Let loose your horrid needs and speak.

“He sent you these?”

“And more.”

“What do you want?”

“A little conversation for old time’s sake.”

I won’t begrudge a visit from a beautiful woman, and should she truly be the story’s muse, she may have answers to all that remains a mystery.

“Have you truly forgotten?”

“The doctors blame it on the trauma. The purpose of the book is to piece together the pieces I’ve lost.”

“The only purpose?”

“The main purpose. You’re asking about the money.”

“I’m asking about you.”

Bloodstained pages turn crimson in memory.

The navigator speaks: she makes me feel heard when no one else will listen. My friend, the world condemns what is good and meaningful, declaring it wicked and gross, but you have always heard me out.

“You could have come by these pages some other way.”

“All things could have come about some other way, and it’s only the narratives we hold that tell us otherwise, these fragile things we call memories.”

“That’s no argument.”

“I’m not arguing, just stating facts. You remember facts, don’t you? The hypocrisy of prostitution laws during the Great War?”

“They forever marked the women, even those whose only crime was to birth a child out of wedlock, forced to register as a prostitute.”

“You do remember.”

“I haven’t forgotten everything.”

“Do you remember who taught you?”

“Preston, probably at this very table, as he wrote each word in that damned and damnable journal.”

Anonymity for men. Infamy for women.

“There are those who say I killed him.”

“No one knows who you are.”

“They know I exist. They think I was Preston’s muse and that perhaps I drank his blood before he could say too much.”

“Did you? No. Of course you’d say no, and then the shoes, men’s shoes.”

“Small feet can wear a larger size.”

“Do you want to be a suspect? Is that the fame you’re after, to be remembered, no matter the cost?”

“It’s your remembrance I’m after. No one else’s.”

“There’s nothing to remember. Preston never introduced us.”

“All he had of me was an address.”

“An address?”

“And ten years ago, all my letters stopped, like I’d been forgotten.”

I was thirty-two when we met. She was running from her family.

“Then you can’t be his muse.”

“The narratives are breaking down.”

“If those are his letters, they could be worth something, but you should’ve been honest with me.”

“I’ve always been honest with you and see no reason for that to change.”

My head hurts, and I fight to string thoughts together.

“This was a mistake.”

“Your mistakes were made long ago, and if you’re going to publish the journal, it’s better to confront them now.”

“I’m trying to remember a friend, to make sense of what he did.”

“And I’m trying to help a friend remember, so you can come to terms with what you did.”

I stutter over my response, half demanding clarity to her accusation, half hiding in my own silence and by that silence made blind. “You–you seem to know more than anyone.”

LUCY (wanton in white lace)
Come to me, that I may taste your longing and know all that God forbids honorable, onanistic men.

GODALMING
Don’t talk like that my love.

LUCY
And how would you have me? In the pretense of a church’s blessing? Would you paint a corpse in incorruption? Have at me, Lord. I’m yours, here, in this mausoleum of your making, where there’s nothing left of me but lust.

I remember the page and shudder at its vulgarity, a vulgarity pointed and personal, aimed at the heart of all that’s decent.

“What happened can only truly be known by you, but I know you and much that you’ve forgotten.”

“You don’t know me.”

She doesn’t answer, but lets the air grow heavy with my denial.

“You don’t know me.”

I see her then, twenty years younger, dancing atop the hill in a Victorian wedding dress, dancing outside the observatory in a stolen wedding dress—pale skin burned. Her face blushed red against white collar and black eyes, her smile suggesting a pleasure with the world and with herself and with the role she’d chosen for me to play. Somewhere, music played. She danced, and I swayed like a tree in the wind if she were the wind, the stars, and the sea.

“You don’t know me. I’m remembering his life, a life told on neatly-lettered pages.”

Her hand reaches across the table to hold mine, and her flesh is sharp and cold. My blood’s heat rises in cheeks and throat.

“You’ll have to introduce me.”

He looked up from the journal, his eyes eager and wide. I see the emotion buried there, in the blackness of his pupils, the assumption that quickens the pulse.

“She makes me feel heard when no one else will listen.”

“I bet she’s a real good listener. Has big ears, does she?”

“My friend, the world condemns what is good and meaningful, declaring it wicked and gross, but you have always heard me out. Hear me now when I say you’ve got it wrong.”

He smiles at me, his teeth white and straight, as perfect as his lettering, but his eyes are wild; they were wild and desperate all the time I knew him, and I’d known him since the beginning. He came to Hollywood to be an actor, but his face was neither leading man nor character. It was just a man’s face, a mediocre face, and mediocrity has no place upon the screen. Every bus home overflows with mediocre men gazing blindly into the unseen space between dreams-breaking and homecoming. Only, Preston stayed, weaseling into jobs that didn’t pay, writing scripts that didn’t sell, sleeping with women who didn’t know the difference.

His lettering got him his first real break, a job as a producer’s assistant, taking dictation from a man who thought his every thought a goldmine. Preston’s work earned him a reputation, one strong enough to find more work when the producer found him with his wife.

Preston texted me that night, the old kind of text you had to work for with your thumbs, rat-a-tat on a key until the right letter appeared. I remember the text still, when I’ve forgotten the thousand scripts I read that season: Beautiful quickly rabid skulking. He was stoned, I thought but no, sober and purposeful in his prose, only allowing himself four words to capture the moment while he caught his breath.

Beautiful quickly rabid skulking.

Why did that strike me as the only writing worth writing in a town full of scribes, printing their hopes at Kinko’s? I expected brilliance and nuance from a man who could give the middle finger to Strunk and White while he captured what he gave the boss’s wife. They’d said: write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs. He wrote truth that broke the rules, and that’s what I’d expected–truth not trash.

LUCY
Have at me, Lord. I’m yours, here, in this mausoleum of your making, where there’s nothing left of me but lust.

“I assumed my affections would be the price for your assistance. The life I’d known always came with a price.”

She sits across from me at the table and in the grass outside the observatory on a Friday night in a stolen wedding dress, still high off the joint she smoked before the laser show; Pink Floyd still echoed within our skulls.

Lights flash outside the bistro’s window. A siren chirps and falls silent.

“They came to me. I want you to know that.”

I ignore the activity outside and focus on the feel of her hand. It’s a teenaged hand, a runaway hand, a hand with no idea what dangers await her, only the danger she’s left behind. I feel the offer in her flirtation, the promise of payment for her rescue, and for a moment, I consider the possibility of letting her pay, that self that I was for a moment being the only self Preston could believe.

The bistro door opens, and a bell jingles.

She calls to me, raising paths of desire like a labyrinth, but he who chases is lost. I have to let her go—to be her deliverance and salvation, but to let her go, unbothered—to become for her both ship and sighting, that forever she might know that the vessel of her departure is proof her safe harbor awaits.

Preston dragged a box cutter’s blade through the drapes, shredding them to ribbons, which would break union rules were this a union job, but he’d taken it upon himself to prepare the scene where Lucy lures Godalming inside her cage, where the drapes, torn by her nails, suggest the danger mortals face in her embrace, lust overwhelming reason, propelling her action, a starved beast provoked by the scent of blood. Godalming’s death would seem ordained had Preston not started the script with a scene in this very room, darkened with dust and neglect and entered by an aged Godalming, the first to enter in many years. A second man stands at the door.

GODALMING
I don’t want to be here.

JOHN SEWARD
No one, blissful in his misremembered past, welcomes correction.

GODALMING
I remember well enough to end all sleep and bring to ruin what might have been days of rest.

SEWARD
What prompts you to pick at the scab of forgetfulness, when these fitful memories only convince you of your innocence?

GODALMING
I desired only to be her salvation and, though you will not hear it, am guilty of nothing but an impotence which failed to redeem the dead.

SEWARD
In memory, you’re innocent in both act and desire?

GODALMING
Purity is polished in the struggle against temptation.

Newly rewritten pages rested newly on Lucy’s bed, printed black on red paper to distinguish them from prior rewrites. Preston nestled his chin upon my shoulder, a momentary Thunderdell, birthing a second head to mock and muck out the first.

“What prompts you to pick at the scab of forgetfulness?”

I glanced at him and back at the pages, written for the day, revising the action between Godalming and Lucy, each stalking the other, each armed to overwhelm, to plunder treasures from the flesh.

“He wouldn’t do this.”

“To say he doesn’t remember, isn’t to say it wasn’t done.”

Preston set the box cutter on Lucy’s dresser, where it glinted in the light as if touched by God, like the holy relics Godalming wielded that he might have his unholy way, Lucy dressed in her once-intended wedding gown, a Victorian wedding gown, her face red from a day in the sun, hunting men among the prostitutes. She flinches before the crucifix, and by these symbols of salvation, his damnable desire is done.

Preston plopped on satin sheets, man and journal.

“For a decade, you’ve held a devotion that would make romantics shudder. Only one thing takes a girl, hardly known, and makes of her an idol—guilt, my innocent, guilt. All these years of sending cash was money spent to buy your own redemption, now well and double paid. What you make from our movie, don’t ply upon the past. It’s as good as never happened.”

“Only because it never did.”

Preston opened the journal at random, smiling gleefully as his eyes skimmed my words, his smile tight in the bliss of the secret he believed he’d uncovered.

“On the press tour, this will have to be addressed. The inspiration alone will distinguish us from every other would-be sequel. You’ll be famous, my friend, the both of you. No, now, don’t look at me that way. You broke no laws, and the audience will eat this up. We’ll publish the journal as supplementary material, and I promise you, our names will live forever.”

He found a passage, the delight clear—if condescending—in his eyes, and the words I hear him speak in memory, I’ve never read upon the page, the geyser of his life’s blood rendering them beyond retrieval.

She danced, and I danced with her, caught in the movements of the world which swayed to keep her rhythm, all creation committed to her worship and her worship alone, betraying to her beauty all former gods and their paltry promises of paradise. Eden is the fruit offered by nimble fingers stained and dripping with its juice, and there is no garden but the taste, swallowed—flesh, seed, and all—until we are nourished in the offering of that which we’ve desired.

Her fingers slip away as the tinkling tinkle of the bell dwindles, dims, and dies, but as my reproachable future approaches, I hold her in my gaze.

“Preston was wrong about what makes an idol, and that’s why he could never understand the Lucy he tried to write nor the girl I danced with on the grass.”

“I never wished to be worshiped.”

“Gods are molded from the hope you can’t hold, the desire met only in passing. Godalming lost his to a demon, but I lost you to my better nature, both that we might dream forever of a future that can only be deserved in its denial.”

The blade cut cleanly halfway through and snagged, the metallic point made hesitant by the gore’s grim finality, my hand trapped within its wellspring, and for endless seconds I could neither complete my cut nor flee, my mind incapable of reasoning to release the knife, incapable of reasoning at all, intending only to release his life and, in its gushing end, wash clean the night his mouth had sullied. His eyes, wide, stared until the mausoleum that had been a man, doors now shut, lay still. My mind filled with its own screaming, the tortured cries of a sanity rent by that same blade, sliced and tattered like the drapes, and like the drapes, that sanity fell full and dark, blocking the window to the war beyond.

– Thaddeus Thomas