The salty, damp wind blew in through the window, carrying the cloying, sweet smell unique to overripe, rotting fruit.
When Simon opened his eyes, water was dripping rhythmically from the eaves onto the zinc bucket on the windowsill, making dull, tapping noises.
New Salem did not have London's long, cold, soot-choked morning mists. Morning here always arrived abruptly—one moment the sky was a purplish black, and the next, scorching sunlight would pierce the clouds, evaporating a scalding, humid heat from the entire island like steam from a wet, absorbent sponge.
Simon sat up from his hard wooden bed and rubbed his throbbing temples.
It had been exactly three months since he arrived on this small colonial island in the South Pacific.
This place was a completely different world from the Old Continent.
Waking up every morning, the first sounds to reach his ears were the sharp cries of seagulls and the tide crashing against the black reefs, followed only later by the coarse shouts of shirtless native laborers chanting on the harbor docks.
He lived in a two-story old wooden house left over from the colonial era on the northern side of the island.
The house was small, its wood somewhat blackened from being gnawed on by seawater and termites, and the paint on the roof had completely peeled away. During the rainy season, leaks were a common occurrence, and Simon had to set out three rusty zinc buckets to catch the rainwater seeping through the gaps in the beams.
But from the window, as long as he raised his head, he could see a desolate coastline lined with bent coconut trees and the boundless, grayish-blue sea in the distance.
Simon had no complaints about the director's decision to “exile” him here. After all, he had chosen it himself. Though it was no retirement paradise, at least... it allowed a man to catch his breath.
Six o'clock sharp.
Simon got out of bed with practiced ease and walked over to the low table.
A single-burner brass alcohol stove sat on the table. Striking a match, he boiled half a kettle of well water that tasted faintly of sea salt, then retrieved half a loaf of black bread—hard as stone—from a cloth bag and sliced it into thin pieces with a scalpel.
His breakfast was extremely simple: black bread, a few pieces of hard dried fish blackened from being cured in coarse salt, and two local wild fruits he had just plucked from a tree outside. The skins were very sour, but the flesh provided some hard-won hydration.
After breakfast, Simon changed into a faded linen shirt, slipped on his somewhat worn brown coat, and pushed the door open to step outside.
The dirt ground outside the wooden house was incredibly muddy, washed out by the torrential rain from the previous night.
Simon walked to the nearby wooden fence and untied the reins fastened to it.
It was a small, terribly ill-tempered local pony. Its coat was a messy mixture of colors, and upon seeing Simon approach, it immediately drooped its ears and snorted impatiently.
“Behave, buddy.”
Simon patted its neck and swung himself onto its back.
The pony flicked its tail somewhat reluctantly and trudged slowly through the muddy grass along the path leading to the harbor district.
As the representative dispatched to New Salem by the director, Simon nominally held the title of Archive and Supplies Overseer.
His workplace was a brick-and-wood building situated behind the harbor trading post.
The work was not complex, but it was extremely tedious: inventorying fabrics, ironware, and low-grade medicines shipped from the Old Continent; recording every merchant ship and fishing boat entering or leaving the harbor each quarter; sorting through colonial administrative archives that quickly grew moldy in the humidity; handling brawls between local native merchants and drunken foreign sailors; and the most important task of all—submitting a lengthy, tedious “Security and Supply Flow Report” to headquarters every month.
For Simon, this ultimate mundanity had instead become a form of sanctuary.
The pony's hooves clattered against the road as they entered the harbor district.
The fishy smell of the sea in the air grew instantly thick.
Street vendors had already begun setting up their stalls along the roadside. Simon pulled on the reins as he passed a dilapidated stall run by an old native.
“The usual, Mr. Simon?” the old native grinned, revealing a mouth missing most of its blackened teeth.
“Yes.” Simon handed over a rusty copper coin.
The old native ladled a bowl of thick, black liquid from a boiling iron pot.
It was a bitter tea highly favored by the locals, brewed from a blend of dried leaves and seaweed. When Simon had first drunk it, the taste—resembling a mixture of yellow mud soup and rotten grass roots—had nearly made him vomit on the spot.
Yet, without him realizing when, in this perpetually hot and humid environment that left one's head in a daze, this intensely bitter liquid had actually become his daily necessity for clearing his mind.
Standing beside his horse, Simon tilted his head back and drank the entire bowl of bitter tea in one resolute draft, letting the bitterness that rushed straight to his brain wash over the back of his tongue before handing back the empty bowl.
“The rainy season might end early this year, sir,” the old native said as he wiped the bowl.
“Let's hope so.” Simon patted the pony's rump and continued toward the trading post.
The trading post's warehouse was thick with the scent of burlap sacks and wood mold.
Simon walked into his office, took off his coat to hang it behind the door, and sat down at the slightly wobbly varnished wooden desk.
The desk was piled high with cargo manifests he hadn't finished verifying the night before—thirty crates of quinine for treating malaria, two hundred bolts of coarse cotton cloth, and several crates of low-grade black powder bound for the inland mining districts.
He took out his quill, dipped it in ink, and began checking the seals item by item.
Time slipped away to the scratching sound of the quill gliding across paper.
Life on the island had its own unique rhythm.
For instance, the mailman here only came twice a week.
He was a middle-aged, sun-bronzed man of mixed race who rode a battered tricycle. Everyone knew he would appear on the harbor streets at precisely two o'clock on Tuesday and Friday afternoons.
Consequently, on those two days, the merchants, sailors, and idlers near the trading post would gather one after another under the shade of the trees outside the office building, smoking cheap cigarettes and waiting expectantly for the mail. For this small island far removed from the civilized world, those few yellowed letters were their sole connection to the outside.
At exactly two o'clock in the afternoon.
The crisp ring of a bicycle bell sounded right on time from the street corner.
The crowd gathered outside erupted into a minor commotion.
Simon did not go out. He remained buried in a stack of spice export tariff sheets, clicking the beads of his abacus as he calculated the figures.
Thud.
A letter carrying the distinct salty scent of ocean transit and the smell of kraft paper was suddenly tossed through the window by a dark hand, landing precisely on Simon's ledger.
“Got one for you, Mr. Simon. From England, traveled halfway around the globe,” the mailman outside called out before pedaling off to the next house.
Simon's fingers froze on the abacus beads.
He set down his quill and picked up the letter.
The envelope was made of the most ordinary brown kraft paper, its edges slightly frayed, stamped with transit postmarks from several different ports.
The recipient on the front of the envelope read: Simon, New Salem Colonial Archive.
And in the sender's section in the bottom-left corner was a line of slender, neat, yet slightly cramped English handwriting—
Alvin.
Simon froze.
The fingers pinching the envelope tightened slightly, his gaze lingering on the familiar signature for a long time.
The wind blew through the window, flipping the pages of the ledger on the desk with a soft rustling sound.
Simon did not open it immediately.
He flipped the envelope over, inspected the intact black wax seal on the back, and then gently placed it on the far upper-left corner of the desk before picking his quill back up.
But for the next half hour, he did not get a single calculation on the ledger right.
At four-thirty, the rain poured down without any warning.
Raindrops the size of beans violently lashed the wooden roof of the trading post, producing a continuous, deafening roar that completely drowned out the waves and shouting outside.
Simon blew out the oil lamp on his desk.
Leaning back in his chair, he stared at the hazy, white sheet of rain outside the window. Finally, he reached out and took the letter from the corner of the desk.
He used his scalpel to pry open the black wax seal and pulled out the two thin sheets of letter paper inside.
The first half of the letter was filled with a large amount of seemingly meaningless trivia:
“Simon,
When you receive this letter, New Salem should be in its most miserable season, yes? I hope your stomach is adapting to the food over there.
The weather in London has been dreadful lately. The rain has been falling since last month, and the cross atop St. Paul's Cathedral hasn't shown itself in nearly half a month. The smog over in the industrial district is getting worse. I heard the city council plans to restrict coal burning, but obviously, no one is paying them any mind.
The Suppression Bureau arrested another batch of people in the East End last week. I heard it was a group of novices attempting to hold some sort of private ritual in a basement. The whole thing was rather comical; they even mispronounced a letter in the incantation.
On a side note, the old blacksmith shop I used to frequent has closed down for good. The old blacksmith fell ill and died last month, and his son sold the shop to a bakery.
And as for that tavern you used to love, the owner packed his bags and left for France last week. Your little sweetheart is gone too. It's run by a crude German now, and the malt beer tastes like sour grass. It's absolutely undrinkable.”
Simon silently read these words.
His eyes were calm, as though he were reading an unrelated newspaper summary.
But his mind was racing.
In his eyes, every seemingly casual word was being automatically rearranged.
Alvin was absolutely not a person who would waste pages on idle chatter. He wrote about “the old blacksmith shop closing down,” “the tavern changing owners,” “the Suppression Bureau arresting novices”...
Simon's gaze slid downward, landing on the last two lines of the first page:
“By the way, that person is no longer here.
At least, on the Third Archive Floor, his dossier has been stamped with a red ‘Destroyed’ mark.
So, you have nothing to worry about over there, and do not attempt to inquire about any news from the Old Continent through any means.
Nothing ever happened here.”
Simon's finger lingered on the word “Destroyed” for a moment.
The only sound in the air was the raging rain outside.
He knew who Alvin was referring to.
Ryan.
Simon simply folded the first page of the letter neatly, pressed it back down onto the corner of his desk, then stood up and walked to the office doorway.
Outside the warehouse, the torrential rain had already turned the drying yard into a shallow lake.
A dozen shirtless local laborers were scrambling to rescue several crates of wet cotton cloth with tarpaulins.
“Hurry up! Lift that side!” the director cursed, waving a leather whip under the corridor.
The workers slipped in the muddy water and scrambled back up in a daze. Some muttered curses in their native tongue, while others burst into raucous laughter as a companion fell face-first into a mud puddle.
In a corner, a young native laborer took advantage of the moment the director turned to yell into the rain. He quickly reached into a damaged fruit basket nearby, pulled out a ripe yellow banana, and expertly stuffed it into his ragged pocket.
Standing by the doorframe, Simon saw this scene with absolute clarity.
His gaze met the young man's in the air for a single second.
The young man turned deathly pale with fright, freezing in place.
Simon did not speak, nor did he shout.
He simply shifted his gaze calmly, looking up at the dark clouds rolling across the sky.
If that banana weren't taken, it would rot into a pile of foul-smelling mush by tomorrow afternoon anyway in this humid, rainy weather. Many things on this island were like that—food, wood, clothes, even human lives, all rotting and fading away at a visible pace.
There was no point in exposing him.
By evening, the torrential rain finally stopped.
Once the dark clouds receded, the orange-red sunset dyed the entire island of New Salem a bizarre, blood-red hue.
Scattered yellow lights began to kindle along the coast.
Simon rode his pony back to the wooden house on the northern side.
He did not light a lamp. He simply dragged a battered bamboo chair out and sat under the eaves in front of the wooden house.
The sea breeze became dry and cool again, carrying a hint of the earthy scent left behind by the torrential rain.
Simon pulled the letter from his pocket and flipped to the second page.
The final page contained only a few lines of writing, the handwriting far scribbler than before, clearly added in haste by Alvin before sending it off:
“Simon,
If one day, in New Salem, or in some corner of the South Pacific, you hear someone ask about the name ‘Ryan’...
Tell them you know nothing.
You have never met this person, nor have you ever heard of this name.
Because from that day forward, the Ryan we knew was already dead.”
The wind rustled through the leaves, making a soft whispering sound.
Simon stared at those final words for a very, very long time.
Until the sky turned completely dark, the last glow of the sunset entirely swallowed by the night, and the sound of the crashing waves once again became the sole protagonist of this world.
He did not burn the letter.
Simon stood up, walked back inside, and pulled open the bottom drawer of his varnished wooden desk. He carefully folded the two sheets of paper and tucked them away beneath a pile of rusty old keys and several blank record books.
Then, he closed the drawer and turned the iron lock.
He walked to the window, looked out at the pitch-black, boundless sea, and adjusted the collar of his shirt.
Tomorrow morning at six o'clock.
He would still have to get up to boil water, drink that bowl of bitter tea, and ride his bad-tempered pony to the trading post to verify the next manifest of cargo bound for the interior.
Life went on.
Rate on N.U.
