"The Soul Cages" - Chilling Tales for Dark Nights

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Tiddies! The dam finally broke. Tiddies! Echoed the mouths of nearly a hundred broken-toothed and missing-toothed, bewiskered shipyard workers. It always started with one man. Then everyone in the shantytown tavern would raise their mug or hat or soup can, or whatever they were drinking out of, and echo the sentiment. And that's when the Tiddies song began. Tiddies, titties, titties! Tiddies, titties, titties! It was a song where the lyrics didn't progress much further than the title. No melody, three beats on, one beat off per measure. All it meant was that someone in the group had reached the edge of his limit first, and now he was obligated to spot several others with his own allotment of rum or whiskey. They would stomp their feet and wrap their fists until they were too tired or something else distracted them. You might have guessed that there was a shortage of women in this environment. You'd be right. No woman in their right mind or with any shred of awareness for her safety would have lived in our little shantytown, affectionately referred to as Perdition Ridge. It was barely safe enough for children like me. Our little ramshackle huts of cinderblocks, corrugated tin and wooden pallets lined the shore like the barnacles on the ships. More often than not, we were walled in by a skybox of fog that made our little place feel infinite and isolated, cordoned off in its own little nether world.

Things were fairly predictable after the tiddies song burst out. With someone else doling out the precious supply of liquor, others got careless about hitting their own limits. Then whoever didn't pass out would go home to their own nests of rubbish. My old man never quite blacked out. He always managed to drag himself home to me, where I pretended to be asleep. All too often he would step on me, and I would do my best not to cry out. He'd slur the tiddies song a couple of times in defiance of the others, and I'm sure, out of a measure of longing to go back home. I mean, home, home.

I didn't remember much about our real home. I remembered that it was warm, lights were brighter. It wasn't damp and miserable, and I wasn't always getting sick. I kind of remembered Mother. When she talked to me, her voice was soft and soothing. Not so much when she talked to Father.

I barely remember the beach that she would walk along. She would take me with her. Her and Father yelled at each other a lot, so we ended up on the beach more often. It had this pale sand that was almost white and soft enough to sleep on. That's all I've got. I didn't remember hearing her say that she loved me and that we would see each other again someday, but I tried to convince myself that she had, and I just forgot. The only thing that I had left of her was a small drawstring bag full of that pale sand. I kept it inside of a small lockbox I found on the shore, which in turn I kept under a couple of loose floorboards. It was the only way to keep them safe from father. It was the only way to keep anything safe from father.

Once in a while, I could get father to talk to me. It wasn't often, so I would bullet him with as many questions as he could handle before he got annoyed. Where was mommy? When could we go see her? Why did everyone but him wear just one glove? How did we get here? The only question he would ever answer with any clarity was how did we get here? Everyone in town had been invited by the fisherman. That's how he had introduced himself. He never gave a proper name. He just showed up one day shortly after mommy had given birth to me. A strange character that wore a wide-brimmed hat studded with hooks, and a long flowing raincoat that was more like a robe than anything else. He carried a long walking stick carved from rotten driftwood that curled up and above his head where a small glass lantern hung. He showed up asking for father by name, asked him how things were going for him and his nice young family. Father explained that things weren't going very well at all, which seemed to be what the fishermen had been expecting to hear. So he proceeded to explain that he oversaw a great maritime operation on the shore of the sea, where men could make a good living in a short amount of time. The catch was that it would require father to relocate. He would have to live on-site and be willing to work long hours. But business was good, so pay was high, and it would only be a few months before father would be able to move back home and live off of his earnings. If he turned out to be a good worker, they could make a regular arrangement of him working for a few months and then spending the rest of the year at home with his family full time. My father was little more than a backbone and a set of thumbs. He eschewed work and he loved to drink. The prospect of high returns for relatively low effort drew him in. Mother wasn't for it. She said that the fisherman was like his long-lost twin brother or something, full of fine promises that each ended in a noose. It turned into one of the worst fights they had ever had. And then, there we were, in Perdition Ridge.