Chapters 4-6: Kraken in a Coffee Cup
A ship sails beneath the sea, claiming the souls of drowned sailors.
Missed Chapters 1-3? Catch up here.
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
Chapters 4-6
Chapter Four
I am one of this crew; my shouts go up with theirs; my oath is welded with theirs; and the stronger I shout, the more I hammer and clinch my oath as a bulwark against the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetic feeling is in me; hell’s quenchless need seems mine, and from that hell, the cabin boy, who sports a sprout of gray in his beard, takes me under his wing. The mechanics of sailing above the sea are not the same below, and even seasoned hands, he assures me, need tutelage.
“For some time past,” he says, “we have haunted these uncivilized seas frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. Few of them know of our existence; even fewer have knowingly seen us. For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they’re sprinkled over the entire watery circumference, many of them pushing their quest along solitary latitudes, so as seldom to encounter a news-telling sail; the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all these have long obstructed the spread of tidings concerning our existence. Yet, it’s hardly to be doubted that several vessels have reported a sunken vessel sailing.”
I stare numbly at my verbal assailant who, after pattering this great mischief, has seemingly escaped my look of exasperation; the tale in question is no less than a quarter-lifetime long; all these words obstruct my comprehension of his instruction. Yet the cabin boy’s diction is marked by great ferocity, cunning, and malice; and those who by accident have given ear to his prattle compile upon it the greatest exaggerations and most ruinous rumors, for the soul fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life in the wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors which circulate here. Not only are soulmen unexempt from that superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are the most directly acquainted with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle. Alone, in such remotest waters, that though one sailed a thousand miles and passed a thousand shores, one would not come to any chiseled hearth-stone or aught hospitable; pursuing such a calling as he does, the soulman’s fancy is impregnated unto a mighty birth.
No wonder, then, the outblown rumors that circular regarding the cabin boy’s speech incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, half-formed fetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which invest him with new terrors unborrowed from anything spoken. So that he strikes such a panic, few sailors are willing to encounter the perils of his jaw.
Those who, previously hearing the cabin boy’s lessons, by chance catch sight of him in the beginning of the thing, boldly and fearlessly, raise themselves into the ocean’s stream to work the sails, although sailors there already be. The helmsman stands safely at his wheel and the captain in his cabin, but the sailors, battered by rushing water, crash against man and mast and yet refuse to come down again while the cabin boy’s lectures continue.
“And as if this reality of ours has thrown our shadow before it,” the cabin boy continues, “we find spiritualists declaring us athirst for human blood. Their demon familiars are ‘struck with lively terrors at our presence’ and ‘in their flight, dash themselves against the rocky shores of hell.’ And however sailors may amend such reports; yet the superstitious belief is revived in all who set out to sea.”
I am alone to listen, unable to join the others in their escape, and desire to join them I do, despite their many calamities—sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, devouring amputations, and fatalities, to the degree death exists among this strange crew; these disastrous impulses shake the fortitude of many brave sailors to whom the cabin boy’s prattle has come.
I watch as the cooper, who abandoned his barrels to take refuge in the highest rigging, is devoured by a shoal of flying jumbo squid, and we are forced to follow the shoal across half the ocean before we can collect his defecated and hazy remains and leave him to regain form below decks; he is gone two full moons before another barrel is knocked down to staves, and then I could swear he’d been a taller man.
I would think the captain overawed by the rumors and portents concerning his cabin boy and intend to mention this to him when I am recalled to his cabin. Upon our entry the cabin boy at last falls silent, and the captain speaks of the early days of soul fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long-practiced surface-sailors to embark in the perils of this daring profession; such men protesting that although other bounty might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase apparitions was not for mortal man, that those who attempt it would be torn into a quick eternity. On this head, they claimed some remarkable scriptures might be consulted.
“Nevertheless,” says the captain, “some there were, who even in the face of these things were ready to give chase to stoved souls; and a still greater number who, chancing only to hear of the Shade, distantly and vaguely, without specific details, and without superstitious accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the chase if offered.”
The look in the captain’s eye suggests he was not only one of these early men but their leader and commander; he turns that eye to me, questioning my commitment, though I have been with him these several weeks. I have seen many wonders but not a single soul. Now, he turns his eyes to his table with its maps and devices, and I trace his gaze with my own; one of the wild suggestions referred to there, is the unearthly conceit that the Shade is ubiquitous; that we sail in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.
“There must be another ship,” I say.
“All there is, we are.” He moves a coffee cup, and there we are again, sailing deep in Asian seas.
This conceit has some faint show of superstitious probability. For as the secrets of the sea currents have never yet been divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Shade beneath the surface remain unaccountable, even to her men; and from time to time there has originated the most curious and contradictory speculations regarding her, especially concerning the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, she transports herself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points.
“Forget you not,” the captain says, “the curious wonders of the surface world, of the inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there is said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters are believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are fully equaled by a soulman’s reality.”
Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; it cannot be much matter of surprise that soulmen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring the Shade not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves of spear-like teeth should be planted in our flanks, we would sail away unharmed; or if indeed we should be made to spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in unensanguined currents hundreds of leagues away, our unsullied sails would once more be seen.
But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there is enough in the earthly make and incontestable character of our vessel to strike the imagination with unwonted power in these limitless, uncharted seas. What then, I ask the captain, does a craft such as ours risk in the chase after a drowned man’s soul?
He traces his finger across the map, gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden gleamings. When that finger taps against the edge of his coffee cup, it jostles the dark, half-consumed contents and kicks up dark and murky waves, within which I perceive the chips of chewed boats and the sinking limbs of torn comrades. Survivors swim out of the white curds of a direful wrath into serene, exasperating sunlight, only to find that the dark sea below stirs once more with boneless arms.
“Although we are their only hope, we are not their only hunter,” he says, “and we are in no way immune to that which destroys both body and soul.”
The captain drags his finger back across the aged map, and yellow paper becomes green waters; among the ink-drawn waves, I see a whaling captain, his three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies. He seizes the line-knife from his broken prow and strikes upon a whale, blindly seeking with a six-inch blade to reach a fathom-deep life. The beast swims before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which eat upon deep men, till the captain piles upon the whale’s hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest were a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.
This collision forces that captain to turn towards home, he and his men with him, but though they are battered and disfigured, they are alive to the last. My own captain then withdraws his hand, for in all that carnage, there is nowhere for us to ply our trade.
“As they stood in peril before the whale,” says the captain, “so we have confronted the lake of fire, hell-beyond-hell, Tartarus risen and made flesh; for long months of days and weeks, anguish gripped those who survived, and only three of us there were, me, the helmsman, and the cabin boy.” The captain stops for a moment to meet the eye of the cabin boy. “Then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad. Only then, after the encounter, the final monomania seized him, and the helmsman and I were forced to lace him to the mast. When the lad’s delirium seemed left behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark den into the blessed light of shallow seas; even then, when he bore that firm, collected front and followed my orders once again; and we thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, he, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.”
“And now the cabin boy lectures,” I say.
“Now he lectures,” says he.
Chapter Five
It is the middle-watch: a fair moonlight broadens upon the under-surface, and the soulmen gaze beneath the white veil and through lead-colored waters. A strange dreaminess reigns all over the ship and all under the sea, only broken by the intermittent dull sound of a sword. This is the imagined loom of time, and I myself am a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the fates; I pass a woof of marline between long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and the cooper slides a heavy oaken sword between the threads and drives home every yarn. In his eyes we build a barrel, but in mine, my fate is measured, drawn out against the standard of all who set out to sea.
On one strand, I was beaten by the captain of a merchant vessel for trifles against his command, and when we docked after three years at sea, I spilled penniless and vagabond onto the streets. He made me a byword among sailors, and no ship who set to harbor would take me. My every morsel I had to steal, and the gutter became my refuge. It was a damp, drizzly November, and I paused before a coffin warehouse, below the apartment where sat the black-eyed widow.
“Is the captain her husband?” I have asked, but no man answers.
The fixed threads of the warp are subject to but one single, ever-returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seems necessity; and here, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads, blending my life with these others, my cause with theirs. Meantime, the cooper’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly; and by this difference producing contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric, giving an unpredictable change of pattern to the direction of our lives; this sword by which he builds up his barrel, by my fancy, finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance—aye, chance, free will, and necessity—all interweavingly working together, twisting a man one way and the other before returning him to his determined end. The straight warp of necessity is not to be swerved from its ultimate course.
I start sharply from my thoughts at a sound so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of marline drops from my hand, and I stand gazing up at the surface of the moonlit sea whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees is that mad cabin boy. His body reaches eagerly forward into the current, his hand stretches out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he echoes the plaintiff cry. He stands hovering over me, half suspended in the sea, so wildly and eagerly peering into the darkening deep, and I would think him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of fate, and by those wild cries announcing their coming.
“Sailors? Souls?” I ask.
“Whales,” the helmsman whispers.
The cooper squints at the surface in search of unseen ships. “Somewhere, someone cries, there she blows!”
“Maybe not this time,” I say. “Maybe they sing in the solitude of the sea, undisturbed and unperturbed.”
The cabin boy drops out of the current and onto the deck. “On the lee-beam, two miles off! a school!”
The whales go down, heading to leeward, long black shadows against the gray. Just then the captain bursts out his door and rouses his men to action. “Apply yourself to the practice, boys! Give chase as if they be our quarry.”
The sailors at the fore and mizzen come down and fix the line tubs in their places; they thrust out the cranes, back the mainyard, and swing three boats into the sea. Outside of the bulwarks, the eager crew cling to the rail with one hand, one foot expectantly poised on the gunwale, like a long line of a man-of-war’s men ready to throw themselves upon the enemy’s ship.
An exclamation takes every eye from the whales, and all glare at the captain, surrounded by three dusky phantoms fresh formed out of air. “Put the new man at your head and fly as if Tartarus itself were at your flanks.”
The men pause long enough to grab me by the shoulder and then spring over the rail; the sheaves whirl round in the blocks; and with a wallow, the three boats dive into the sea. We pull out from under the ship’s lee and spread ourselves widely, to cover a large expanse of water.
In the nearest boat, the headman’s unspoken voice speaks into all our heads. “Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; break your backbones, boys.”
The rowers ply themselves into the oars just as the Captain sends his dark phantoms, spilling over the railings and into the sea; at the sight of them my heart grips tight my chest, and they pursue us as we chase the whales.
I will my own thoughts into the water. “What is it you stare at?” I chide my men. “Pull, then, pull; nevermind the brimstone devils. Snap your oars, you rascals. Bite something, you dogs! Long and strong. Give way there, give way! The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull.”
My men row and the two boats with us, and behind us, the three phantoms gain. It is a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast and omnipotent sea; the surging currents along the six gunwales; the deep’s endless glens and hollows into which the cetaceans flee; the crushing grip of the ocean upon every inch of our being; the voiceless cries of the headsmen and harpooneers; all these outdone as the three gray stains draw nearer, like shadows at noonday.
I, the raw recruit, marched from the bosom of shore into the fever heat of battle, for the first time pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunt, perhaps, myself, a dead man’s ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world. The dancing dark water made by the chase turns inky thick; jets of bubbles tilt past us right and left; and the whales separate their wakes. The boats drift apart, the harponeers now on their feet, standing above their headsmen. On a falling current, we rush along with such madness, the lee oars scarcely escape being torn from the row-locks.
We sink into the enormous wallowing sound as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter. The currents curl and hiss around us like the erected crests of enraged serpents.
A short rushing sound leaps out of the boat, the darted iron of the cabin boy; it strikes its target and passes harmlessly through, and the emotion I feel off my men is one of victory. Then all in one welded commotion comes an invisible push from astern, while forward the boat strikes as on a ledge, nearly tossing me from my perch; our current-sail collapses and explodes; something rolls and tumbles like an earthquake beneath; and a gush of phantasmagoria rushes over us, moments etched upon the sea. The whole crew are tossed helter-skelter into the gray, curdling deep. Phantom, whale, and harpoon all blended together; and the whale, who is but a stand-in for a sunken and sinking soul, escapes.
The men gather floating oars, lash them across the gunwale, and tumble back to their places in the suspended craft, seeming a coral boat grown up to us from the bottom of the ocean. Elsewhere, the other men likewise scramble back into their boats, immortal in these jaws of death, and from their voiceless words jumbling together, I gather how they rate our run: our boat alone has struck her target.
Afloat in the depths, I stare into the faces of my men and realize I know not their names, nor do I know my own. My history runs behind me and my future before on the same unbroken yarn, but from it some pieces of me are lost. Taken, perhaps, in the moment I sacrificed myself to the sea and fell upon the Shade’s smooth deck.
“If it’s death you’re courting,” the widow said, “my late husband soon sets out to sea. Sail with him, and a coffin will be not be wanted.”
Some part of me sails beneath the waves; some part is buried already, and this half-death is the finest life I’ve known. The men cheer, and the Shade dips down to retrieve her warriors, the helmsman and our captain beaming in dark waters.
Chapter Six
Days, weeks pass, and under easy sail, I sit with the captain at his maps and learn to trace our multiple positions: off the Azores; off the Cape de Verdes; on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality, southerly from St. Helena. I see us in miniature within the aged parchment, gliding through these waters, with the waves rolling above us like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, make what seems a silvery silence, not a solitude. Lit up by the moon, the water’s limit looks celestial; and we some plumed and glittering god uprising from the deep.
Outside, the crew lift their voices, and so impressive is the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that my soul instinctively desires a lowering, although to what I do not know. Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not quiver more; and within the cabin, the captain feels their wonder and lays his hand upon my shoulder.
When not otherwise engaged, on moonlight nights, it has become the cabin boy’s wont to mount to the main-mast head and stand a look-out there. Tonight, a finned spirit has lit upon the rigging and hailed the half-immortal crew.
The captain looks to me in answer to that hail. “The men be desiring their sheol leave, son. The topgallant sails and royals must be set, and every stunsail spread. Order it so and my helmsman to his place. Then, with every mast-head manned, direct our piled-up craft down before the current and forward into the dark.”
I step back. “Me, sir? Order your crew?”
“When men fiercely wish the same destination, they’ll obey a barking dog. Howl and they will interpret your intentions exactly as I’ve said.”
I walk the deck with uncertain, side-lunging strides, and command the crew with the captain’s words, as best as memory serves me. Whatever I’ve said, the crew jumps into instant action and follows his every syllable, though they be uttered by me.
The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail current filling the hollows of so many sails, makes the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet; while still she rushes along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her—one to mount direct to Hades, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And as I watch the men’s faces that night, I think in them also two different destinations are warring. While their chanting voices make lively echoes along the deck, every strike of their hands to the task sounds like a coffin-tap. For life and death this crew works, and the ship swiftly speeds into a darkness beyond starlight. From every eye, like arrows, eager glances shoot, looking for what I do not know, but every sailor swears he sees it, one at a time, vaguely ahead, but never in the same locale; and I suppose our descent must be into madness.
This sunless mirage has almost grown to encompass all the world and suspends us in a silent hour, when, again a small brilliance ahead is descried by all. With the immemorial superstition of our profession, and in accordance with the preternaturalness which it invested, the soulmen swear that whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or however great the depth, that ineffable glow lights the harbor of our pursuit.
In my heart, though, reigns a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it treacherously beckons us on and on, in order that monsters, after alluring us by lamplight, might turn round upon us and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage depths. These apprehensions, vague but awful, derive a wondrous potency from the contrasting serenity of the sea, in which, beneath all its black blandness, there lurks a devilish charm, as for hours we voyage along, through a void so wearily, lonesomely mild, that all space vacates itself of life before our urn-like prow.
But, at last, close to our bows, strange forms dart hither and thither before us; while thick in our rear flow inscrutable sea-shadows. Finned spirits cling to the hemp, as though they deem our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to desolation. And heave and heave, still unrestingly heave the black currents, as if their vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it has bred.
We drift into this tormented sea, where guilty beings transform into fish and fauna, condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store and beat that black current without horizon. But calm and snow-white, the light beckons and grows, and in its halo, a city, and at the edge of the city, a harbor, and into the harbor, we sail.
During all that blackness of the elements, I, though given for the time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve; and seldom addressed my mates. With everything above and aloft secured, nothing more could be done but passively to await the issue of the current. So, with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, for hours and hours I stood gazing dead down-current, while an occasional gust off the cold-hearted currents would all but congeal my very eyelashes together. Now at the end of that shared captaining, between myself and the fates, we arrive in glorious harbor, but my heart is still cold and clinging to its dread.
#
Coral and stone form the cresting wave that is the city of Sirene. We enter the harbor through a bubble membrane, but do not then enter a world of air; all the city is still submerged, but now our ship’s wood groans with the release of pressure.
“For the Christian, hell included paradise, and for the Greeks, Hades had the islands of the Blessed,” the cabin boy says. “They are closely wed to each other, places of torment and plenty, and so the peoples who serve them are likewise bonded.”
I watch the crew leap from the Shade onto a narrow, volcanic quay, but I cannot move. “They are the enemy.”
“Above we are at war, but this is a place of perpetual truce.”
When the cabin boy, too, has followed, I am alone on the ship, and the choice to take my leave in this strange harbor or not is mine. I’ve been confined to the Shade for months, and I can remain forever more if that so suits me; and though I hesitate for several eternal seconds, I leap and give chase to those who have gone ahead. Around me clings a film, a tension-born barrier against the pressures of this sunless land.
“No wonder that these Sireners, born to the bottom, should take to the sea,” the cabin boy says, waving his hand before the dark buildings and the bioluminescent lights. “They first caught driftwood souls, scattered in the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for floaters in the dark; more experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured those just beneath the edge of daylight; and at last, launching great ships on the sea, they explored this watery world; put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it; peeped in at Behring’s Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting war against any man, woman, or child who should dare to perish at sea.”
“You make it sound as if they have a navy,” I say, glancing back at the harbor, empty save for the Shade.
“And each and every one of their ships is corded with a portentousness of unconscious power; our very Shade was taken from their number,” he answers. “And thus have these naked Sireners, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders. The sea is theirs; they own it, as Emperors own empires; other soulmen have but a right of way through it, and by other, I mean us. The Sirener resides and riots on the sea; he alone comes up from it in ships; to and fro plowing it as his own special plantation. This is his home; this is his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions upon land. He lives in the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides under the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years we knew the land, but Sirener was born to the sea; and the surface to him is another unreachable world, stranger than the moon to a Bostoner. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so the Sirener, out of sight, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.”
—Thaddeus Thomas
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