1st 3 Chapters: Kraken in a Coffee Cup

A ship sails beneath the sea, claiming the souls of drowned sailors.

You’re familiar with retellings of famous stories. You remember the trend of slapping zombies and sea monsters into classic novels. This—isn’t—either of those.

Kraken in a Coffee Cup takes chunks of Moby Dick, mixes them up, and blends them with new material to create a story about a ship that sails beneath the waves, capturing the souls of drowned sailors.

While retellings plays with the story but throw out the original text, Kraken plays with the original text but throws out the story. It’s fun. It’s experimental and deep—ocean-bottom deep—and it’s free to read.

In addition to the text taken from Moby Dick by Herman Melville, the opening image was inspired by Cornelius Matthews and his story, “Noadiah Bott; or, Adventures with A Governor and a Widow”; from his The Motley Book (1838).

I’ve also used passages from the book of Jonah beyond those quoted in Moby Dick and taken passages from the hymn, “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood” by William Cowper (1772).

The serialized novella, Kraken in a Coffee Cup, begins August 23rd, 2024.

Cornelius Mathews, The Motley Book: A Series of Tales and Sketches.(United States: J. & H.G. Langley, 1838)

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851)

Kraken in a Coffee Cup

The first three chapters.

Chapter One

On a damp November, I pause before a coffin warehouse below a black-eyed widow who watches the muddy progress of carriages as they pass in the rain. The storm is slight but lingering, a veil fallen upon a mournful horizon, and from behind the pane, her black eyes settle with a glint of recognition. Ashamed of my coffin lust, I flee, a wretched man in flight from a sin which cannot be outrun. Night falls upon New Bedford, and with neither food nor bed, I wait for sleep as I wait for death, though no one will pay the warehouseman for his goods on my behalf. I shall enter that under-earth journey without the merest dinghy to buoy me.

My teeth chatter against the curbstone, beneath a dim light not far from the docks. Above the light, a sign swings and upon it rises a tall straight jet of misty spray. The sign’s dilapidated little wooden house, gable-ended and one side palsied, leans sadly over my sharp bleak corner, and poor men with tattered soles step over me in search of golden liquor. I know the poverty which finds its sanctuary in a bottle and have seen the wealthy drunken on the tepid tears of orphans. Honest feet are poorly clad, and the same hard hand drives us under, some to drink and some to die; the time has come I play the latter.

Though most ignore me, one stops, and I look up into the widow’s eyes. She calls me friend and commands her companions to lift me to my feet, and in her company, I find myself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminiscent of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hangs a large oil painting of unaccountable masses of shades and shadows. A frosted hull is half-capsized over three, blue, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. 

The widow follows my gaze to the painting. “It’s the end of the ice-wrecked Starling, the phantom of which they say anchored in this very harbor.” Her description reeks of mockery, but I am no one to argue with the cruelties of human kindness. “At first light that day, her widows watched the ghost ship sail, and the town’s fastest vessels, giving chase, lost her in open seas, clear and calm.”

I nod with a pretense of belief, but my attention is now on the bar, where stands a vast, arched bone of a whale’s jaw, so wide a coach might drive beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, a cursed Jonah, a withered old man, who sells the sailors deliriums and death.

He pours his poison into villainous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel lines measure fullness in degrees. Fill to this mark, the charge is but a penny; to this a penny more; and so on to the full glass—the Cape Horn measure—which I gulp down for the widow’s shilling.

“Have you someone to bury?” she asks, and when I shake my head, her eyes sparkle, like burning ships in a midnight sea. “I recognize you from the coffin-maker’s, measuring your shoulders against his wares. If it’s death you’re courting, my late husband’s ship awaits you. Sail with him, and a coffin will not be wanted.”

“Your late husband?” I ask.

“Whenever you find yourself growing grim about the mouth; whenever you find yourself bringing up the rear of every funeral; and especially whenever it requires a strong moral principle to prevent you from deliberately stepping into the street—get to sea as soon as you can. Consider it a substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish, Cato may throw himself upon his sword, but you will quietly take to the ship.”

 Her speech leaves me both befuddled and nostalgic, for when I was a child, a similar circumstance befell me; whether it was a reality or a dream, I never have entirely settled.

I was crawling up the chimney, as I had seen a little sweep do a few days previous, when my stepmother dragged me out by the legs. After the most brutal bathing of my remembrance, she packed me off to bed, though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon of the twenty-first of June, the longest day of the year. I threw myself at her feet, beseeching her to give me a good slippering for my misbehavior; anything indeed but condemning me to lie abed such an unendurable length of time.

She ignored my pleas and scuttled me off. For several hours I lay there broad awake, but at last I must have fallen into a troubled nightmare; and slowly waking from it, I opened my eyes, and the once sun-lit room was now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame; nothing seen, and nothing heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over the bedspread, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form to which the hand belonged, sat by my bed-side. For ages piled upon ages, I lay there, frozen with awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir one single inch, the horrid spell would be broken.

Then the creature spoke in that black and silent moment and chose as its own, my stepmother’s voice. “There are ways aplenty to die in this world, but if you’re going to risk Sheol, and Lord knows your curious nature will risk it long past the days for a slippering, risk it for something noble, something true; risk it for family, neighbors, church, and country, not for the draw of spaces bleak and narrow with no more reward to offer than in digging your grave.”

 I give the widow no answer that night, though she announces herself certain of my answer. She cannot know I’m no stranger to the call of ships at sea, but they have made themselves strangers by fate and circumstance. With the widow gone, I settle down onto the bench to sleep, reeling from starvation quenched with liquor, praying to God for annihilation; amid the whirl of woe I feel, a deep stupor steals over me, as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, and there’s naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in my passable berth, my misery drags me drowning down to sleep.

In the morning, with my welcome spent at the tavern, I seek out a chapel as refuge. The sky meets me with driving sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy, bearskin jacket, I fight against the storm until I reach a small scattered congregation of sailors, sailors’ wives, and widows. A muffled silence reigns, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshiper purposely sits apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. 

Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seat myself near the door and, turning sideways, am surprised to see the widow beside me. Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there is a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in her countenance. 

She is the only person present to notice my entrance. She leans to my ear and whispers, “Those whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say—here lies my beloved; they know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all faith and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave.”

“Your husband will not sail again from these harbors,” I say. “I cannot serve upon his vessel.”

“Why is it a universal proverb of the human dead that they tell no tales, though they contain more secrets than a hundred shipwrecked shores?” she asks. “How is it we refuse to be comforted for those who dwell in bliss; why do all the living strive to hush all the dead; and why should the rumor of a knocking in a tomb terrify a city? All these things are not without their meanings, but faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.”

Yes, I think, there is death upon the waters—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into eternity. But what then? We have hugely mistaken this matter of life and death. What they call my shadow is my substance. In looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through water, and thinking thick water the thinnest of air. My body is the dregs of my better being. It is not me. 

“What was least of your husband is lost,” I say. “The best of the man you remember remains.”

“Do you imagine a ship made by men will carry you into countries where God does not reign?” she asks, and I confess no contradiction. 

“An old woman, sea-bereaved, may watch a young man sail,” she says, “and a young maiden may yet welcome home the captain she’s to call her husband. Serve the ship that sails to Tartarus. Its captain will do right, both by his men and by me.”

#

At the widow’s word, I prowl among the shipping, but how plainly I’m a fugitive. No baggage, not a hatbox, valise, or carpetbag, no friends accompany me to the wharf with their adieu. 

At last, I find a ship receiving the last items of her cargo, where claim is made the captain can take me to the ship I seek; and as I step on board to see its captain in the cabin, all the sailors desist from hoisting in the goods. I see this; but in vain I try to look all ease and confidence; in vain I essay my wretched smile. I see it in their faces; strong intuitions assure them of the one certain truth.

I am no innocent.

Chapter Two

“Who’s there?” cries the captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making out his papers for the customs. That harmless question mangles me, and for the instant I almost run. Thus far, he has not looked up, though I now stand before him; but no sooner does he hear my hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance. 

“We sail with the next coming tide and welcome enough any honest man that goes a passenger,” he says.

“Not a passenger,” I say. “I’ve come to offer my hand.”

“I’ve hands enough.”

“I’ve been told otherwise, sir.”

“I have discernment enough to detect crime in any,” the captain says, “but in this world, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. I’ll charge you thrice the usual sum and be assented to, or else judge you openly.”

“I was sent by the widow above the coffin-maker’s,” I say.

The captain rests uneasy in his chair. “The ship you seek is forever out, never again to find her harbor, but if upon her you mean to sail, I’ll point you to your state-room. You travel weary and look in need of sleep.”

For a room of my own, I would sail through the straights of Hades. I sign a contract, written but unread. I enter and would lock the door, but the lock contains no key. Hearing my foolish fumbling, the captain laughs lowly and mutters about the doors of convicts’ cells.

All dressed and dusty as I am, I throw myself into my berth, and find the little state-room ceiling almost resting on my forehead. The air is close, and I gasp. Then, in that contracted hole, sunk beneath the ship’s water-line, I feel the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the deep shall hold me in the smallest of his bowels’ wards.

Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in my room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, though in slight motion, hangs infallibly straight and betrays the false levels among which it hangs. The lamp torments me; as lying in my berth my restless glance finds no refuge. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry. 

The time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship, all careening, glides to sea. I sleep a hideous sleep and see no black sky and raging sea, feel not the reeling timbers, and little hear nor heed the far rush of the awaited ship, which even now is cleaving the seas with its passing.

Then from a dreamless slumber, the frightened master shrieks in my dead ear. Startled from my lethargy by that direful cry, I stagger to my feet, and grasping a shroud, stumble to the deck to look out upon the sea. A panther billow leaps over the bulwarks and bathes me in its claws. Wave after wave leaps into the ship and runs roaring fore and aft, till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat. The white moon shows her frightened face from the steep gullies in the blackness overhead, and aghast, I see the rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, only to be beat downward again towards the tormented deep.

Terrors upon terrors run shouting through my soul. The sailors mark me; more and more certain grow their suspicions and furiously they mob me with their question. 

“Why have you come?”

“The widow sent me,” says I, “to serve aboard her husband’s ship.”

The mariners’ faces show both their understanding and their fear, but still, they turn from me and seek by other means to save the ship than to feed me to that widow’s husband. Their efforts are in vain, and the indignant gale howls louder.

The captain calls a halt to their striving. “This storm is the first sighting of the country to which this man journeys. This sea is the shore to which he’s sailed.”

They take me up as an anchor and drop me into the sea; and an oily calmness floats out from the east. The sea is still as I carry down the gale with me, leaving smooth water behind. I go down in the whirling heart of such a masterless commotion that I scarce heed the moment when I drop seething into the ship awaiting me. 

I am sprawled out soaking wet on dry wood—the deck of a mighty vessel with rigging like a pit of vipers. The sea runs above me, through the rigging, and against the sails which catch and deflect the waters as if they were a strong north wind. We are a bubble beneath the waves, riding at speed the currents.

Chapter Three

I have seen many varied crafts in my day; square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; and butter-box galliots; but never such a rare vessel as this. She resembles a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look about her. Her venerable bows look bearded. Her ancient decks are worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshiped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled.

An elderly man helms the turnstile wheel at her reverend helm; he is brown and brawny, like most old seamen, and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style; only there is a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest wrinkles interlacing round his eyes. Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.

“Is this the captain of the stove boat?” says I.

“Come a stove boat for a stove body,” he answers. “Stave a soul Jove himself cannot, otherwise.”

A mist of seawater plays upon my face. “The widow sent me.”

“Why is every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul, crazy to go to sea?” he asks. “Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? This cannot be without meaning, lad. What men seek in the water is their own reflection.”

“Narcissus,” says I.

A thin line of humor cuts open his mouth. “Aye, Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged in to his own swift drowning. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”

“They key to what?” I ask.

“The key to all,” he says. “You know nothing of what becomes of the dead at sea, I dare say—eh?”

“Is that our business, sir? Retrieving the dead?”

“Retrieval would suggest the dead come back. Your scriptures say at His coming the sea give up its dead. Do you assume that’s what day this is?”

“Your wife seemed to be of the mind you’d return, perhaps even supposing my going out might hasten it.”

“My wife?” He laughs dryly amidst the ocean. “Is that what you know of the dead, that you are the vessel by which drowned men come home to their widowed wives? What else do you suppose to know?”

“Nothing, sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. I’ve been several voyages in both whaling and the merchant service, and I believe—”

“Merchant service be damned. Your merchant sailor is crunched, chewed up, and devoured, all on the promise of another man’s profit.”

I am a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at the hearty grief in his concluding exclamation, but say as calmly as I can, “What you say is no doubt true enough, sir. Every man sails at another man’s profit. Every man drowns at another man’s loss.”

“The rich lose only their money, and money, unlike the man, returns with the next successful voyage.”

I stare up at this helmsman, before whom indolence and idleness perish. His own person is the exact embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his long, gaunt body, he carries no spare flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft, economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his broad-brimmed hat.

“I’ve to ship with you, sir, if you’ll have me,” I say, “and I see no way of going back.” In truth, I have a hope that if he rejects me he might spit me back on shore, but this I will not say.

He nods in agreement that such is so, although I am not sure what his agreement means. The sea-current calms. We settle into a drift, and he fastens the wheel and motions for me to follow him down into the cabin. The space between the decks is small; and there, bolt-upright, the true captain sits. His broad-brim is placed beside him; his legs are stiffly crossed; his drab vesture is buttoned up to his chin; and spectacles on nose, he considers the contract laid out across the table, ready for an eager man’s signature.

I wonder why I see no sailors mingling there, none save him and me.

“You say you’re our man,” says the captain in a hollow tone. “You want to ship aboard the Shade.” He throws open a chest, and drawing forth the ship’s articles, places pen and ink before him. I think it high time to settle with myself at what terms I am willing to engage for the voyage. 

“I pay no wages,” says the captain, “but all hands receive their lay, proportioned to the degree of importance of one’s duties in the ship’s company. Being a green hand, your lay won’t be large—”

“—but considering that I’m used to the sea, can steer a ship, splice a rope—”

“Your lay won’t be large,” he says.

“But—”

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust do corrupt.”

“Yet surely—”

“Your soul may be drawing ten inches of water, or ten fathoms, I cannot tell,” he says, “but the lay earned here is not the flesh of fish or anything else to be turned for currency.”

I am struck dumb by this obvious truth. Now that I have gone down to sea, money serves me no purpose, good or ill. Without another question or any understanding of my fate, I sit with him at the table and go to sign the papers. What else is there to be done? Already we are boldly launched upon the deep and lost in its unshored immensities, and the ship’s weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of leviathans.

Only, I find the papers signed already and by my hand.

The captain nods at my surprise, and I can barely hear him say, “The rich man cannot cross the gulf between them.”

I feel the current push us forward, and at his command, I rush topside while the captain stays at his papers. The deck is full with its sailors, and a new man, lean and pale, steers the wheel; his bone-white face traces the lines of his skull. Behind him, we leave a turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks. The envious currents sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first we pass.

Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly we rush. Yonder, just beneath the goblet’s rim, the warm waters blush like wine, and our gold bow plumbs the blue. Time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This sunken light brightens not these sailors, lost in the midst of paradise.

The ship is more than matched; she’s overmanned; and by a crew drawn half-dead from the sea. I climb to address him who steers the ship and of him ask the question the captain never answered. He eyes me dark and sunken and laughs a face full of teeth.

“Never have your shore-bound acquaintances dreamed the trade to which you now are plied,” he says. “Soon you’ll wrench their wretched souls from this fiendish sea.”

—Thaddeus Thomas

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