THE TREE TOMB PART II

This place is a hell hole. Far from the dreamy well-lit corridors that I’d seen on TV. Cold, concrete, claustrophobic… How had they found me? I wouldn’t stay. How did it start? Oh yes, I remember. I had first begun my travels after a chance encounter at the local drinking hole. Banny Macerow was a sailor and a great sailor at that. With every heaving motion of his chest, pumped 60 gallons of salt-seasoned rhum. They frequently turned him away from the blood banks. Non-sailors can die that way you know, having sailors blood. In any case, old Banny was a tower of a man casting a shadow as long as a mile but me and him, we got on famously. Banny had offered to take me on his boat, especially seeing as we loved the same things, mostly the ocean. We both thought how funnily how alive it is. I mean water is water but a lot of it is obedient water. You say “come out the tap” and it does, as hard or as softly as you like. You flush it. You drink it. You let it out. You control it. Banny was never one for such obedience. He preferred the lure of the open seas.

For a man like him there wasn’t much to be afraid of but the way the ocean could just hurl itself leaps into the air and destroy anything it pleased meant that it held a great power over him. There are other world’s between the blue. It's history outdates man and time. We needed only get into a disussion of the Great flood to fuel our enthusiasm while Banny finished packing the chum.

“It was many people” the story even has it’s roots in pagan mythology! I cried wildly… “Adam, Noah, Abraham, Enoch, Isaac, and Jacob had all written documents which comprised the book of Genesis!” I can say with certainty that there was a Great Flood but anything beyond that and Banny was likely to huff his way into a state. Don’t worry Banny, I cooed sweetly, Noah took 2 little kittens on his arc and I’m going to give you one of their spawn for christmas.

He smiled wryly. He was not in the mood for my nonsense. Banny was a staunch atheist although I’m not sure if you could call him that even just because he didn’t believe in calling people things to show you what they did and didn’t believe in. He didn’t think it mattered. Unless… you believed in something that he didn’t believe in, in which case he would string you by your trousers and poke you relentlessly in your sides while all the blood swam in your head.