Page 68 of No One Aboard
Save Our Souls.
She Talks About Shee–Blog Post #111
The Old Eileen
Laioise O’Brien
Just an Irish American lass coming in with my two cents on everything that’s been happening in the news! If you have, somehow, not heard aboutThe Old Eileen, a ghost ship found off the coast of southern Florida with seven people missing from it and one body recovered, you are either living rent-free under a boulder the size of Cork, or you have incredibly strange social media algorithms (what’s your secret?).
Anyhow, I’ve seen a lot of talk about the missing people, but not too much on the boat itself, which instantly caught my attention as having a rather interesting Irish name.Eileenusually meansbeautiful birdor perhapsradianceorlifeif you’re going off the old Irish name, Eiblhn. And pardon me a moment while I profusely pat my own back because I KNEW not only whatEileenmeans but exactly whatThe Old Eileencomes from (thank you, MPhil from Trinity), and I thought it might lend an interesting lens to this very strange case (don’t even get me started on folks going missing in Irish mythology, that could be a blog post all its own).
The myth ofThe Old Eileenis rather rare with little to no physical text to back it up. One of those word-of-mouth stories that rarely makes it to English or paper. It was the name of a boat sent off by a queen who was certain her sailors were the finest in the world. The sails were so big and the boat so huge that she had become convinced her men could sail it right up into the stars, collect them, and bring back celestial riches that would rival anything that could be found on earth. So she sendsThe Old Eileenaway and, big surprise, it never comes back. Did it fall off the earth? Did the men turn against themselves before they even got close? Or maybe, they did make it to the stars, but the sailors became too greedy to share them, and they stayed sailing through the sky forever.
An eerie and lovely name for a ghost ship to have, I would say. And the next question becomes, of course, how did the Camerons know about this myth to have given the name to their ship?Cameronitself is possibly Scottish Gaelic in origin (a word that meanscrooked,bent, orriver). Was Francis Cameron well-versed in rare Gaelic mythology? Unlikely. But actress Lila Logan is also likely of Gaelic descent, and she is known as an actress for doing copious amounts of research into other time periods for roles.
This wouldn’t be the first time a mythological name has had consequences of mythic proportions on seafaring vessels. I find that truth is often stranger than fiction. More than anything, though, whetherThe Old Eileenis a story or a ship, it can be agreed upon that it is first and foremost an omen.
Chapter 33
Rylan Cameron
Call sign: Minnow
Day 8 at Sea
Rylan sharpened his HB pencil with one of the knives from Alejandro’s galley. Wood shavings curled away and left the graphite as sharp as a blade. He was sitting on a counter in the chart house, surrounded by nautical maps and ship’s logs for inspiration, even though he was careful not to let his gaze fall upon the tiny dotted island that made his spine tingle.
He had something thick at the base of his throat that he hadn’t been able to swallow away since his conversation with his father last night. But until he could dislodge it, he couldn’t quite breathe right. He couldn’t find it in him to be either upset by being trapped or excited by the possibility of leaving. He just felt stuck.
Rylan was used to being caught up in the tide of Tia’s willpower. She was infectious. Suffocating, even. Once she had an idea, it was gospel, and anyone not prepared to acknowledge it as such became obsolete. But Francis seemed to place so much faith in Rylan. He’d been tender with him last night. He’d explained himself, at least somewhat. Rylan knew it was impossible to please them both, but here he was, petrified to cross either, so the lump in his throat stubbornly remained.
Rylan flipped backward in his sketchbook, back to August of last year where he had scribbled a comic-style picture of an alarm clock in a nun habit alongside Tia’s dorm room. He had drawn it from a photograph, but the drawing was half finished.
Rylan remembered exactly where he had been when that drawing had been interrupted.
The watertight door to the chart house swung wide.
“Oh hey, Rylan,” Nico said. He cranked the door shut and crossed to the counter where Rylan was perched. “Mind if I...?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry.” Rylan scooted to the edge of the counter so Nico could grab the ship’s log.
Nico wrote his name in the upper left-hand corner along with the date and time. Then he checked the ship’s coordinates on a small screen above the counter and jotted those down as well.
Rylan realized he was staring. “So you do that every hour?”
“You’re supposed to, but it’s been more like every four hours for us since we have one-man watch teams. My uncle asked me to do it for him since he’s already on the helm.”
Memories of playing with the ship’s log when he and Tia were little came to Rylan’s mind. It had been so important at the time, like they were filing information that would be analyzed by historians to come, even though they were only on day-sails and hadn’t needed to fill them out in the first place. It was the imagination of it that counted. They used to pretend to be pirates or international explorers charting their course around the globe. That’s when Tia had come up with the idea for them to have secret sailor names. Call signs.
MJ’s had been easy to come up with.Sherlock.She always seemed to know every little thing the twins had done, even if they were certain no evidence had been left behind. Their mother’s and father’s call signs only came about later.CassiopeiaandMidas. Grand names of mythic and scientific proportions. And Rylan had, of course, insisted on being some kind of fish.
Tia was by far the hardest to encapsulate with one word. She jumped from name to name as they grew older, which used to drive Rylan nuts.Just pick one, he’d beg.
I’m waiting foryouto pick mine, she always infuriatingly replied.
“Whatcha working on all alone in here?” Nico asked.
“Trying to... I don’t know. Distract myself.”
