Prelude
The tale of how Dylan Daly vanished into the sea is both strange and wonderful. Strange because it was so out of the ordinary and unexpected…..and wonderful because of just that. It is a tale that has been told many times through myths and legends that find ways to circumnavigate the globe like the very ships that carry the sailors over the crashing and howling seas, through gales and calm waters and find ways of swimming into our minds and hearts like the creatures who call the deep blue their home. But to tell the tale, one must go back to where it all started…..at the very beginning.
Dylan Daly himself had been an unusual sort of child, shy and timid, precocious at times and so eerily quiet that people tended to overlook him as though he weren’t there. Although Dylan was loved by both of his parents, he was not always loved by everyone. People often made rather snide and out of place remarks about how he was shy, quiet, unobtrusive and liked to lose himself in his mother and father’s library….for if it was one thing he loved above all, it was reading.
When he was very small, Dylan would wander into the family’s library and pull any kind of book from the shelf and would read long into the night, hidden under the blanket on his bed with a flashlight and enraptured by the words printed on the dusty yellowing pages that smelled of must and dampness. Dylan voraciously read anything and everything he could possibly get his hands on. He read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Dracula, King Arthur, Frankenstein, Treasure Island and a host of other authors whose works he so admired and grew to love. But there were others who questioned this small dark haired brown eyed boy who spent his days all holed up in the library.
“That child, is FAR too educated.” One snippy woman once said to Dylan’s mother, Elizabeth. “It isn’t right for boys like him to be educated. Soon they start getting ideas of their own and, heaven forbid, he will surpass the girls!”
“My son is as intelligent as anyone.” Elizabeth would snap back. “If you think otherwise then I truly feel sorry for you Madame. Sorry because you cannot recognize talent when you truly see it and when you see it in others, it shines a light on your own faults and mistakes.”
Despite all of the badgering, the snideful comments and all of the nasty things people said, Dylan kept reading at the urging of his mother. Every book took him on a new adventure to faraway places and away from the troubles of the world, letting his imagination run wild in those endless fields of boundless creativity and led him to create a world of his own in which he ruled as king. Yet as time passed, it became clear to Dylan that those sunny days spent with his mother, were slowly setting. Then….when Dylan was nineteen…..night fell.
Elizabeth had quite suddenly grown grew deathly ill. No one knew what had caused her to go into such a downward spiral, not even the best and most intelligent doctors who seemed knowledgeable in their studies of every disease and ailment of the human body. Not a single one of them could understand or deduce what was happening to Elizabeth. She grew thin, pale and gaunt with each passing day and with her health, her beauty fled too. Her dark hair had gone ghostly white and lank, her fair skin turning ashen as dark circles pooled beneath her fading brown eyes. Dylan’s once strong mother now was a weak and frail shell of her former self and was almost in every sense, a skeleton of what she had once been.
Dylan….come.” she said weakly holding out her bony hand.
Dylan quietly knelt beside her bed and held her brittle hand in his. “Yes mom?” he asked.
“Promise me you will be good.” She said weakly, running her fingers over his soft brown hair.
“I will be good.” Dylan answered.
“Promise me you will be brave in the face of danger.”
Dylan nodded fervently.
“There is something….”Elizabeth said weakly, her eyes going wide and alert. “A few years more…..he…..he will return.”
Dylan was startled, even frightened at his mother’s words. His only thought was what every doctor concluded before this….delerium. “Mom,” he said, trying to keep calm. “I don’t understand. Who? Who is coming?”
Elizabeth slipped something into her son's hands, a tiny pendant hanging on the thread of a black, leather cord. It was so small, tiny and made of bronze in the shape of a pirate skull and bones. Dylan felt the tears stinging his eyes, burning like a wet fire as a single tear ran down his cheek.
"No," he choked. "Oh Mom, please."
“Take care Dylan,” Said Elizabeth. “I am with you always.”
When she shut her eyes and fell still, Dylan buried his face in his hands and wept for his mother, now gone forever. The tears stung his eyes and burned the palms of his hands but there was nothing Dylan would be able to do to block them off. Outside, he could hear the waves crashing against the shore and against the rocks as though they called his mother’s soul back to them.
“Goodbye Mom.” Dylan choked. “I love you.”
