Kym_Mûryer:_Shadows_in_the_Ledger_VIDEO
Port Coldwater, Newfoundland — November 10, 2025
The Polaroid still burned in his pocket like a hot coal when Kym stepped back into the Appalachian dusk. The recorder's weight pressed against his ribs, feeling different now—not mere evidence, but a steady heartbeat pulsing in the gap between justice and memory.
He lit a cigarette with hands that remembered every name he'd whispered underground. Smoke curled up, mingling with the valley mist—another ghost among the throng. Beyond the tree line, a dog barked twice, then went quiet. The road lay empty both ways.
Kym didn't glance back at the community center. His eyes fixed on the mud-caked sheriff's patrol car at the gas station across the highway, lightbar dark. Same model from the photo. Same man who'd clasped that little girl's hand.
The cigarette hissed as it hit the puddle. He flexed his fingers—not gearing up for a fight, but bracing for what lay ahead.
Quietly. Always quietly.
Like flipping a page in a ledger only he could read.
Fog rolled in after midnight, thick and soundless, engulfing the harbor. Streetlights faded after ten paces. Halyards clanged faintly against masts, then dulled to thuds. Even the gulls hushed, as if the mist bore a warning.
Beneath the fog's veil, the predator ship stirred.
Not its anchored hull beyond the breakwater, but its crew. Two black tenders detached like embodied shadows, slicing through black water toward the derelict fish-packing warehouse on Pier Seven. Condemned for years—boarded windows, sagging roof—but lights glowed inside. Doors, chained outside, swung inward.
Kym Mûryer watched from the customs office roof across the lane, breath even, coat slick with sea mist. He'd waited since dusk. He knew they'd return. They always did. The six teens they'd grabbed last night—foiled by his broadcast—had been scooped up by Coast Guard, alerted by anonymous tips. The ship had lost its haul. Now it hunted replacements.
Port Coldwater teemed with the unseen: migrant workers bunked in sheds, runaways hopping shelters, foster kids freshly outcast with nowhere to crash.
Easy pickings.
Kym had spent the day shadowing the vulnerable—not the crew, but their prey. Notes in bus station lockers, murmurs to shelter staff, cash to a fisherman for his skiff standby. He couldn't save everyone. But he could complicate the chase.
As tenders bumped the dock and dark-geared figures hauled crates inside, Kym slipped down.
No front door. He took the storm drain under the pier—a Prohibition-era tunnel for bootleggers, known only to rats and the ragged.
Warehouse air hung cold, reeking of brine and diesel. Five teens this time huddled on concrete, wrists zip-tied, eyes wide but tearless. Picked for their silence—no kin, no paper trail.
A boy, maybe fifteen, glanced up as Kym emerged through the floor grate. Recognition sparked.
"You're the voice from the radio," he whispered.
Kym nodded. The signal had crackled over local AM: static, then names, then: If they're taking you tonight, bolt for the red buoy. Help's waiting.
He sliced ties with a whisper-silent blade.
"Back door," he said. "Rail tracks to the lighthouse. Boat's there."
"What about you?" the boy asked.
Kym eyed the main door, footsteps nearing.
"I'll stall them."
Not with fists. With minutes.
As the teens melted into fog via a rusted side exit, Kym hit every light switch, flung bay doors wide. Fog flooded in like an unbidden specter.
Crew burst in to emptiness—save Kym, centered, hands pocketed, mist coiling at his boots.
"Where are they?" the leader snarled.
"Gone," Kym said. "Your ship's flagged in three Interpol databases. No more North Atlantic berths."
The man lunged.
Kym dodged—not striking back, just buying time. Seconds here meant yards for the kids toward the lighthouse.
A siren wailed afar, closing in. Coast Guard, chasing Kym's breadcrumb trail.
Crew faltered, bolted.
Kym didn't pursue.
He strode into fog, harbor lights haloed, sea humming low.
The vulnerable had vanished under cover.
Not into oblivion.
Into refuge.
Kym Mûryer—who once thought the world heeded only blood—now grasped that the softest saves roared loudest.
He headed for the lighthouse, six souls ripe for hope, not hunters.
Fog would burn off by dawn.
Port Coldwater would feel a touch less hollow.
Kym pulled the scorched Polaroid from his pocket, its surface fogged like a shattered mirror. Scrawled on the back beside a faded date—March 4, 1982—a name: Mûryer. No coincidence. The ledger throbbed, pulling him to another coast, another era where python hands had begun their weave.
San Diego Rope Factory — March 4, 1982
His python hands—long, cold, methodically squeezing—set to work in the gutted U.S. Navy rope factory at Rope Street and Cable Avenue. Networks buzzed that morning: first Trident sub slipped Bangor undetected; Reagan would soon tag the new immune deficiency as priority. News crackled from a harbor patrol radio perched on a capstan bitt, speaker popping like hemp in embers.
Kym Mûryer hit waterfront via northbound barge, heavy with mooring line and tar stink. He disembarked at 2:11 a.m., marine layer thick with diesel and ebb tide. Five blocks down Harbor Drive past the carrier—flight deck stamped 1961, year the plant shuttered—both relics taut with promise: jets or cordage. Tonight, just predator and fresh coils.
He picked the factory for its 1944 ledger, plucked from a gull nest in the clock tower: Mûryer, one 'r', ropewalker apprentice from Southampton, sacked after botched splice dropped a lifeboat. Lineage traced to Yorkshire village, great-granddad deported for pinching a marlinspike. Bosun logs told of Jack's snake-capstan forearm ink—as if throttling knotted tighter with twists. To Mûryer, the circle wasn't poetry but lay: strands looping back to origin twist.
Bay air tasted tar-sharp, iron-cold. Moonlight speared broken skylights onto coiled line mountains like slumbering serpents, each stamped PROPERTY OF NAVY 59200—digits shadowing Mûryer from crusher to boxcar to warrant to chessboard to trench to cockpit to wardrobe to that first gaze meeting the walking ledger.
Tonight's coils cradled two new lays:
1. Walter Cord, 38, night rigger at naval yard, from Whitby shipwright who jumped in '33 to dodge North Sea ice-caulking.
2. Lewis Strand, 27, relief line inspector, great-grandson of Belfast ropemaker who sheathed the first Atlantic cable in 1858.Chapter 21: Shadows in the Ledger
Port Coldwater, Newfoundland — November 10, 2025
The Polaroid still burned in his pocket like a hot coal when Kym stepped back into the Appalachian dusk. The recorder's weight pressed against his ribs, feeling different now—not mere evidence, but a steady heartbeat pulsing in the gap between justice and memory.
He lit a cigarette with hands that remembered every name he'd whispered underground. Smoke curled up, mingling with the valley mist—another ghost among the throng. Beyond the tree line, a dog barked twice, then went quiet. The road lay empty both ways.
Kym didn't glance back at the community center. His eyes fixed on the mud-caked sheriff's patrol car at the gas station across the highway, lightbar dark. Same model from the photo. Same man who'd clasped that little girl's hand.
The cigarette hissed as it hit the puddle. He flexed his fingers—not gearing up for a fight, but bracing for what lay ahead.
Quietly. Always quietly.
Like flipping a page in a ledger only he could read.
Fog rolled in after midnight, thick and soundless, engulfing the harbor. Streetlights faded after ten paces. Halyards clanged faintly against masts, then dulled to thuds. Even the gulls hushed, as if the mist bore a warning.
Beneath the fog's veil, the predator ship stirred.
Not its anchored hull beyond the breakwater, but its crew. Two black tenders detached like embodied shadows, slicing through black water toward the derelict fish-packing warehouse on Pier Seven. Condemned for years—boarded windows, sagging roof—but lights glowed inside. Doors, chained outside, swung inward.
Kym Mûryer watched from the customs office roof across the lane, breath even, coat slick with sea mist. He'd waited since dusk. He knew they'd return. They always did. The six teens they'd grabbed last night—foiled by his broadcast—had been scooped up by Coast Guard, alerted by anonymous tips. The ship had lost its haul. Now it hunted replacements.
Port Coldwater teemed with the unseen: migrant workers bunked in sheds, runaways hopping shelters, foster kids freshly outcast with nowhere to crash.
Easy pickings.
Kym had spent the day shadowing the vulnerable—not the crew, but their prey. Notes in bus station lockers, murmurs to shelter staff, cash to a fisherman for his skiff standby. He couldn't save everyone. But he could complicate the chase.
As tenders bumped the dock and dark-geared figures hauled crates inside, Kym slipped down.
No front door. He took the storm drain under the pier—a Prohibition-era tunnel for bootleggers, known only to rats and the ragged.
Warehouse air hung cold, reeking of brine and diesel.