I am a perversion. It is not in some emotional self-flagellating or morose manner that I say this. It is not for pity’s sake, nor to warn against my being somehow wrong or ugly. Most of the time, in fact, I am impossibly beautiful. I am however a perversion, it is a simple fact.
An explanation of my condition is a complicated endeavor, which this record is meant to be some attempt at. When these things that I’ve done come to light, when someone finally pieces together the fact that I have and probably still do walk the earth perhaps I can supply this as a way to calm the horror that my existence must surely bring out in humanity.
I do this not to defend myself like some common monster, you cannot hunt me and you cannot find me and you cannot hope to kill me. Maybe once I could have been contained or destroyed but I exist now in a way that humanity cannot hope to assail.
I believe that I was born on an island I know that spent my first years there, till I was fifteen, raised by an old man who didn’t speak to me, I feel now it was out of terror that he didn’t speak rather than, as I thought at the time, cruelty.
In the castle there was always food that he prepared for me, he cleaned me until I could clean myself. I learned to read from the small black and white television in the parlor, learned to speak from it, learned to speak Gaelic from it also. I now speak a great many languages but that was after I learned to learn in a very different way.
Once a week he would leave the island on a boat and come back with more food and other supplies. This story has been told before though, with far more grace and feeling than I could ever tell it, a lonely child on an island, what must he have longed for? What must he have felt?
I can tell you that I was very lonely, yes, but loneliness was my every day I didn’t know what it was to love, I probably still don’t, though I have had many feelings in my time. I learned from the television too that the world was full of people sometimes doing terrible things to each other. Other times doing great but also mostly living normal lives.
The books in the library were my company during the nights as the years passed. I read Jack London and Herman Melville, Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. My favorite of all was of course Alexander Dumas. The Count of Monte Christo I finished on my twelfth birthday, I decided that particular day was my birthday as, when I finished that book, which I didn’t want to end I realized I’d never had one so I gave myself a birthday on that day, which was the 3rd of May 1989 but at that point I was already about twelve years old.
The Island was large and I spent almost every day roaming around it. I would look out to the mainland off the west coast and wonder about the people that lived there. I figured Coronation Street, Brookside and East Enders was a rough approximation of what life was like out there. I didn’t really know though, nor did I know if that country out there was Ireland, England, Scotland or Wales. I wondered about that many times.
The Island had a colony of Wallabies. They were about the size of a terrier and didn’t really bother anyone. They would just hop around and eat every bit of plant matter that wasn’t fenced off. The old man seemed to be at war with them. He spent his days maintaining the castle and the part of that job he seemed to like the most was gardening. If a wallaby got into the gardens he would spend many a long hour chasing it out. Once I let a wallaby in on purpose just to amuse myself, largely though I simply observed the cold war between the old man and the mammals who for many years I thought were some mating of a Kangaroo and a rabbit.
The Island had a colony of gray seals. I would spend many hours watching them swim and dive off the rocks on the east side of the island. One day when I was about seven or eight I was watching them on a warm summer day and all of a sudden something came up out of the water and grabbed one of them. I saw a large white body, rows of teeth, black eyes. Coupled with this the water foamed with blood.
After that I preferred not to go in the water.
There were also deer and puffins and many other wild things on the island and around it. I spent my days studying them, mimicking them and playing with them. They were the only friends I had, poor me. I learned however how animals treat each other, the respect of the wild and the resolution of conflict without killing until killing was a means of survival, and the cardinal rule of all of these animals was this; that the young were precious above all.
So I have set the scene. My days were spent in the lonely halls of the castle with the old man avoiding me, I never knew human company nor the touch of a mother yet I developed very well. I have heard that orphans that grow up isolated don’t develop parts of the brain that make them able to relate to other humans but I seem to be more plastic in my development for reasons that are right now obvious to me but not yet to you.
The day I discovered what I can do came a few weeks after the old man died. There was no pomp or ceremony to it he simply fell asleep in front of the television and never woke up. I walked into the kitchen for breakfast and found him gray and unmoving, I knew immediately he was dead, there was simply nothing there.
I was fifteen but callow and skinny for my age. I devised a plan to get him to the small graveyard in the ruined fortifications of the older part of the castle’s grounds. I went to the gardening shed and retrieved a wheel barrow, pushed the old man into it and carted him to the grave yard carefully.
I wrapped him in a warm blanket from his bed. It seemed unreasonable to put him in the ground in just the clothes he had died in. This helped with the process for me also as I didn’t have to look at the dead gray of his face. Nothing is as lifeless as the thing that is supposed to be animated with the spark of life robbed of its vigor completely.
Later I would learn of all the systems that are employed to animate a body and the different complexities that are unwound to create the countenance of a corpse.
Then I dug him a hole and Carved “Old Man” on a wooden cross I made with a hammer and nails, I couldn’t remember what month it was watching television to find out while his corpse awaited burial seemed wrong. So I just carved 1994 under the name and I put him in the hole and buried him about four feet deep.
Then I started to worry.
I went down to the shore where the dock buildings crowded around the little jetty and looked out at the mainland. I didn’t know where the old man kept the key to the fishing ketch that served as the primary mode of transportation; it was too big to row. There was no rowing boat or other means of traversing the five miles or so of sea that separated the island from the land.
The key could have been anywhere in the castle, I had never seen it and would not recognize it if I did. If I found the key I didn’t even know if I could pilot the boat should I need to. I looked down at the water, then up to the sky. I could neither swim nor fly. Swimming too was out of the question since the day I saw the shark, I was terrified of the water, I still am to tell the truth, even though nothing at all could harm me in all its depths and darkness, something about all that infinity and the gulfs within terrifies me, only the ocean makes me feel small now.
Days passed, then weeks. I should explain that I didn’t want to kill anything in order to eat. I made the food that was in the castle stores go on and on, harvested mushrooms, then blackberries, nettles and other rarer things the guide books in the library led me to. I did quite well. My desire not to kill meant that the wallabies, rabbits and deer of the island were fairly safe.
Yet every day I would stand on the west side of the island and watch the mainland. A few nights I flashed a torch signaling SOS in Morse code, which I had learned years ago from a book in the library. Yet if anyone saw me they didn’t approach the island. Once or twice I saw a boat a mile or two from the island and I waved and shouted but my voice could not compete with the roar of the sea.
I felt desperation for the first time almost a month after the old man died when the television stopped working. It wasn’t the electricity, the picture got small, then it became a tiny spot in the middle of the screen then it blinked out of existence. I panicked as all thoughts of total isolation consumed me. I had to get to the mainland. I ran down to the shore and looked up at the sky at the seagulls flying overhead and I screamed at them and jumped and I, as I have found some imaginative children are wont to do, tried to turn myself into a bird and fly away.
This was a flight of fancy you understand, a very silly thought of a very sad boy who had not nearly matured to his fifteen years. I had no idea what I was trying to do, but in that instant I learned why I was presumably on the island, why the old man probably had not spoken to me, it was not out of cruelty at all. It was out of fear I realized. For as I focused my will upon my body and bid myself take to the air my whole being physically unraveled, much of me for a moment was elsewhere in some beyond place, this I will try to explain later but for now imagine that watching me change you would see an explosion of filaments of matter then from this mess a new form emerged.
My clothes fell to the ground and from under them hopped a seagull. I was still me I could still think, but my consciousness seemed slightly separate from the physical form I now bore. My first thought was that I’d eaten a mushroom I should not have eaten. From the descriptions of the hallucinations and hallucinogenic properties of mushrooms I realized after some movement and experimentation that I was not hallucinating.
A small stunned seagull sat on the stony beach of the island for a long while. Then I panicked; what if I was stuck like this? Where was the rest of me?
Almost as soon as I wanted to become myself again I was standing naked on the beach. I quickly clothed myself as it was autumn and the wind whipped against my pale naked skin. Changing seemed to be like breathing, there was no effort to it no pain no disorientation, I simply needed to focus on what I needed to be and it had happened, but there was also an emotional component, panic and despair had brought on the change.
So there were some questions to answer immediately. Could I only become a seagull, did I have a choice in what I could turn into? Was there only one choice and had I locked myself in by choosing a seagull? Surely this was why I was being kept on the island away from all the normal people I saw on TV that couldn’t turn into a seagull.
Above all what was I? On the TV and in the books I read the thing that could change its shape was either a werewolf or a selkie a creature that could become a seal or a human by donning the magical skin of a seal, but they were not human, rather more seals and belonged in the water away from men. I never had a desire to go into the water but I did know that if the country to the west of me was Ireland, which I thought it probably was, that legends of shape shifting creatures might have some truth, and I was that truth. I have since developed this theory quite a long way from where it began.
The darkness was gathering when I realized I was stiff and cold from thinking away the afternoon sitting there on the beach and I was hungry. I went back to the castle and made myself a meal of baked beans and spam. I read a book entry about Selkies and read that men would trap the female selkie to be their wives by hiding their magical skin, if the Selkie found the skin they would abandon the man with any children she bore on the land and never be seen again.
I imagined as I went to sleep that night that I was a Selkie child and that the old man had trapped my mother and she’d born him a child. Instead of a mundane human I turned out to be a Selkie male who needed no skin to change, hopefully not just into a seagull, hopefully into more than that. My mother then had escaped this island and hoped I would come to her in the sea? Well no instinct pulled me toward the sea and there was no way I was going in there unless I could turn into a big metal ship that couldn’t sink, which I might be able to do, who knew? Tomorrow I would begin to learn the extent of my abilities.