Chapters 7-9: Kraken in a Coffee Cup
A ship sails beneath the sea, claiming the souls of drowned sailors.
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 7-9
Chapter Seven
Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, hidden houses on either hand, and here and there a glob of glowing flesh twitches, like a candle in a tomb. Beyond, the city rises to an obscured peak, as if patterned on a scorpion’s tail, from which protrudes three blue spires stabbing at that great, dark mass beyond. Yet, as we walk, this city is grotesquely familiar, in ways impossible beyond the visions of a fever dream.
We proceed through deserted streets, demonic in their vacant spaces, like the soulless stare of a dead man’s eyes, but presently we come to a smoky light proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which stands invitingly open. It has a careless look, as if it were meant for the uses of the public; above the door hangs a sign, much as one might hang in Nantucket or any other town in any part of the world from which this people have not come, if the stories are to be believed.
The buildings themselves strike peculiar, and for a moment, generosity paints this alien; yet, I can trace patterns in facades old and new; ancient to modern, like the ordering of models in an old professor’s den. This is a city built to replicate our ancient world and then rebuilt and rebuilt again, progressively aging up in style and material until I am faced with portions right out of the land-dwelling, nineteenth century; even the sign above me and its depiction of a kraken, has beneath it, in a recognizable alphabet, the Portuguese word for leviathan.
I follow the cabin boy inside to a vestibule of uncertain hues disguised by shadow; and, hearing loud voices within, we push open a second, interior door to a room that pulls my attention upward to this ceiling hung all over with an array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some are thickly set with glittering teeth, resembling ivory saws; others are tufted with knots of hair; and one is sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. I shudder as I gaze, and wonder who could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed with these are rusty old whaling lances and harpoons, all broken and deformed, but I recognize them clearly for what they are, instruments made by men for ships which sail on the waves, not below them.
The far wall is a great central chimney with creature-filled fireplaces all round, lighting the public room with the ember glow of their translucent bodies. Half the ship’s men drink and laugh with broad-mouthed glee in the company of Sireners; and all protests of fraud drain from my unspoken thoughts.
The helmsman and his drinking companion meet my eye, and there is much in her form which reflects humanity; her laughter and mannerisms are familiarly female, but her skin shimmers and shifts in hue as the light plays upon her movements, flaring first purple and then yellow over patterns of large black squares, like great scales of smooth seal-skin. There is no hair upon her—none visible above a gelatin-like, transparent cloak that blurs her form without fully concealing it. Beyond the end of the cloak, her legs present themselves like a parcel of dark green frogs running up the trunks of young palms. As she looks at me, her head remains in its position, but her eyes swim through flesh for a better vantage.
If I ever once pondered on the idiosyncrasies of one soul compared to another, when I see her eyes, all men become one. We are brothers, and if there be any meaningful difference this night, it is that I alone am frightened; I am the alien.
I take in the others, what I thought a room full of our men and Sirene women, but as introductions are made, I discover my error. There are, in total, three Sirene women present; the rest, including the helmsman’s drinking companion, are men; and by the reputations quoted, all are mighty and fearsome hunters, men and women alike.
The crew find glee in inviting one of the Sirene women to sit with me and in ordering for me a double-portion of whatever inebriation fills their bubble-sealed mugs. It takes me a shy moment before I can pull my eyes away from the glowing, long-toothed beast inside the fireplace and engage my new companion, but when I do I’m confronted by another mistake; her translucent cloak is no adornment. What sits beside me is all flesh. I look to the ceiling, like a penitent seeking God, and ask about the weapons.
“Your world falls into ours and is the starting point for all our arts and sciences,” she says. “It’s why your crew is so famous among our people and why we tolerate your pillaging of souls rightfully fallen to us. You are representatives from that world we have always studied but can never see.”
As she talks, I try to mark the differences between her and their men; I fail and realize I am unable even to distinguish one individual from another. Grasping for some thread of comfort, I exclaim, “They said your name is Ligeia.”
“And you don’t know yours,” she says. “If you’re worthy, we’ll have named you before you leave.”
For the first time since our arrival, warmth flows into my cold and fearful heart; a name, the promise of a missing piece, rebuilt.
I think, perhaps, we have only come for drink and company, but at that moment, from an unseen kitchen, they deliver smokey chowder made of small juicy clams scarcely bigger than hazelnuts, mixed with an unknown fish cut up into little flakes. I have never before attempted to eat or drink below water, but I watch the crew manipulate their bubbled membranes; and, following their example, fill myself with flavors beyond anything of my remaining memories.
“That seems to have cheered you up,” she says.
I heartily agree, and now I see the individuality in the patterns of her colors and the shape of her eyes.
“What is your position aboard ship?” she asks.
I pause, surprised by my own perplexity. “It’s not been said.”
“Where do you sleep?”
“We’ve just arrived,” I say.
“The grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is the first lives aft, the last forward. The mates have their quarters with the captain; and harpooneers are lodged in the after part of the ship. That is to say, they take their meals in the captain’s cabin, and sleep in a place indirectly communicating with it.”
“I have a cot with the captain out of the necessity of my lessons, not the grant of position.”
“He’s teaching you to read our maps?”
I nod, and her eyes dart round her head, flashing cold-hued stares at our compatriots.
“Have I done something wrong?” I ask.
“Your crew has been presumptive.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I was familiar with your first mate, before the sea beast took him.” When she sees that this does nothing to alleviate my confusion, she continues. “You’re being trained for his position, and they’ve wrongly assumed you’ll have his position with me.”
“You’re wrong on both accounts,” I say. “Why would the captain choose me over seasoned men?”
“If I guess correctly, he never chose you; the widow did. As for the seasoning of men, your half-stoved nature takes more from you than a name. Without fail, that to which you are trained is that to which your soul forever clings. The idea that the new first mate might come from among their number is unimaginable to your crew. They understand why you’ve come, even if you don’t.”
Unable to process the suggestion or answer its assumptions, I turn the discussion back. “What do you do on ship?”
She answers in a soft thought, akin to a spoken whisper. “Harpooneer.” If her intent is to keep her answer out of the minds of others at table with us, she fails.
“Chief harpooneer above all soulmen!” cries our helmsman.
She answers him with the same cold glare.
They take no notice. “The unerring terror of the deep and the reaper of ten thousand souls!”
She turns on me like a cornered animal, her eyes frighteningly aglow, but her words come measured and without venom. “You wish to see the city.”
She grabs my hand and, pulling me after her, rushes dolphin-like out the doors and into the dark and narrow street. She stops there long enough for me to feel again the flow of the city which runs down to the harbor and up in such steep measure as to make envious the builders of Babel; a great stone mast of civilization, facing the dread gale of God’s wrath. Its form and position, though, remind me of the belief among archaeologists, that the first pyramids were founded for astronomical purposes; whereby, those old astronomers were wont to sing out for new stars; even as the look-outs of a modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight. And of Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle; he was not to be driven from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything out to the last, literally died at his post. All modern equivalents are but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron, and bronze; men who, though well capable of facing out a stiff gale, are still entirely mute upon discovering any strange sight.
“However high the city,” I murmur, “you’ll never spy the stars.”
“We have seen vermillion stars painted upon the blades of oars; with each having been screwed in a vice of wood, the carpenter having symmetrically supplied the constellation. Our ancestors observed something similar in our dark heavens, and while this pallidness burned aloft, few voices were heard from the enchanted city; who in one thick cluster stood on the sterncastle, all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence which was enlivened by our connection, thought to thought, intelligence to intelligence. Enraptured at the ghostly light, the city loomed up to thrice her former stature, challenging even the great sea-beast with its parted mouth revealing shark-white teeth and satanic blue flames upon its body.”
We float to rest upon the street, and the black houses obscure another degree of the city’s apex. We stand silent in a moment of awe, like worshipers before their idol, until at last she continues.
“The heavens to which my ancestors aspired were alight with the souls of men.”
Living lamps cast fitful shadows throughout the isolated subterranean city where a certain humming silence reigns, though it is hooped round by all the roar of the elements. The land of the surface world is hundreds of leagues away and might as well be a million more; we stand under an open sea, two oceans, and all the heavens, and by a bubble’s skin escape their weight.
An appearance of lightning cracks across that distant skin; magnetic energy, essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven, Ligeia says. Great loadstone ribs curl up the face of the city, supporting the perilous height and holding back the pressure.
“You weren’t born in a bubble,” I say. “Surviving the pressure is your birthright.”
She takes my hand and pulls me upward until we stand on the precipice of the apex, looking down from where the world is small and worship is large. “Given room, we can do more than survive.”
Chapter Eight
From our vaulted vantage point, shadows shimmer through thoroughfares nigh the docks the crew spill out of tavern houses and reel about the streets like fleas in sand.
“Why did you come?” Ligeia asks.
“This is the better life.”
She circles me like a distrustful dog, strangely snuffing. “We make a mythology of life on land. Yet, you walked away from that.”
“You think my life was better than what you have here?”
“Better than what I have?” she asks, mockingly. “I was talking about you.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. You and I both have our ships and the hunt, but that’s all you have. You once had a home.”
“We seem to have adopted yours,” I say.
“You really don’t miss it?”
I give my answer consideration and am reminded of choosing my coffin from a selection I could never afford. “There are moments I think more fondly upon, now that I’m here, and sometimes, I wonder if we have the capacity to break the surface. I’ve not yet dared to ask, for it seems a betrayal, but I would like to again watch a sunrise.”
“Describe one to me,” she says.
“Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld.”
“Thrice, I’ve breached the surface aboard your very ship as the sun burned above us. I never dreamed so much light could occupy so much space, more light it seemed than all the darkness of the sea.”
“I never dreamed a place or a people such as yours could exist in heaven or on earth.”
“In your mythologies, neither is where you place us.”
“Hell,” I say.
She nods.
“I don’t fully understand your supposed connection to that place, nor ours,” I say. I’ve been promised better when we bring the souls to that awaited shore. They tell me we deliver them to paradise and you to damnation, but I can’t fathom that, either.”
“You believe what we do is wrong,” she says.
“It’s an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature that he’s bound to hell, let alone to be the one to usher him there.”
“I appreciate your honesty. Can I be honest in return?” she asks.
I say she can.
“There’s no difference in what we do, you and I; the destination is the same. Your crew requires pretty words to calm their conscience and believe themselves right with God, but we shuttle souls to hell, both the same. We do not choose their end, we simply rescue them from the seas and deliver them to what is fated.”
I motion to the black seas above. “Is that here? Are you filling your heavens with constellations?”
“What we discovered, long ago, was our stars were lost, and we directed them home, and in return—”
She hesitates, and I prod her on.
“In return?”
She motions, as if to say the answer is at hand, but the answer is not at hand; nowhere near. She might as well motion to say: go and gaze upon the emblematic harpoons round yonder public-house ceiling, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and stony gardens floated down the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged hither along the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that? Still, no answers are given. None of it makes sense.
“We rescue drowned souls from hell,” I say.
“Did the widow promise you that?” she asks. “Did the captain?”
I’d heard it so from the crew.
“We serve the fates as one serves a captain when the wages you earn won’t replace the clothes worn through,” she says.
“You don’t wear clothes.”
“You serve the captain to ride alongside him on his ship; that where he goes, you are there, and what power he has is in your hand. Was there no one ashore to serve?”
In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece. You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly burn their lengths in spermaceti candles. And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of Puritanic sands.
Had I the merits, I could have married a New Bedford bride and ridden the fortune of her father, whether it have been a business in town or a ship he owned and set me to captain, our fates tied as one. Only, there came a time a black-eyed widow convinced me this life was better than the coffin, when no coffin could I afford.
Chapter Nine
Fiery pit! fiery pit! you insult me; past all natural bearing, you insult me. Say again I’ve signed my soul to deliver humanity unto hell. Flukes and flames! Start my soul-bolts, but I’ll swallow a live goat with all his hair and horns on.
(I am alone in my thoughts and careful not to loose them adrift into these open waters; lock them away at the Inn, in this room where I’m a new-born, a lubber, unsteady and unsure.)
Fiery pit. (Now weaker than before.) Sea of flames. I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, wherever I sail. I’ll chart the path of my own ship and not be directed to hell by her own demons. {In truth, I chart nothing but go where I must by maps of charity and kindness.)
Somewhere above, by an ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun—slow dives from noon—goes down; and souls mount up! But not mine; she wearies with her endless hill. Time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. Her lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is lost. Gifted now with truth’s perception, I am damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of paradise, for here no paradise be.
I’m demoniac. That wild demon that’s only calm to comprehend itself! The path to my fated purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.
{I ease over the transparent, glowing mattress, thinking I will sink onto its surface, but it consumes me and holds me in a womb of comfort and light. Calm washes over my anguished soul, and the impossibility of sleep rolls in like waves gathered in the storm.)
What now I might wish, has no bearing; the course I’ve set cannot be changed.
(I wake to tranquility and think myself at peace with fate, but when risen from my cocoon, I find my miseries waiting.)
Oh, God! to sail with such a hellbent crew that have so small a touch of human mothers in them! Hark! the infernal orgies! their revelry wakes the city! mars the unfaltering silence of the day! But there is no day on ocean’s bottom. Sireners set out to sea to escape the drink, but our crew, whelped somewhere in the sharkish sea, come here to drown. Dionysus is their demogorgon.
(Again, I flee the endless night of Sirene and sink into sleep’s warm glow where mind-numbed dreams come undisturbed and undisturbing, a gentle breeze to counter a real-world gale; but wakefulness won’t be put off forever.)
#
Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!—I’ve been dreaming over it ever since, and that ha, ha’s the final consequence. Why so? Because a laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s peculiar; and come what will, one comfort’s always left—that unfailing comfort is, it’s all predestined. I heard none of this talk upon the Shade; but to my poor eye, Ligeia looked like truth, in sympathy speaking despite all I, the other evening, felt; for no emotion arisen in me caught her by surprise; she might readily have prophesied it. I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing. Such a waggish leering as lurks in all your taverns, I will there join the crew and drink my madness numb. Come, give a party to the soulman last-arrived, I dare say, happy as a frigate’s pennant.
SOULMEN OF THE SHADE:
Now let ev'ry man drink his full bumper,
And let ev'ry man drink his full glass;
We'll drink and be jolly
And drown melancholy;
Here's to the health of a true-hearted lass.
SIRENE SAILOR: Oh, boys, don’t be sentimental; it’s bad for the digestion! Take a tonic, follow me!
Seek thy rest on fortune’s chest,
And find fate’s circle closing;
And meet thy end,
Where thee begin;
Thy heart’s true wont exposing.
THE CABIN BOY: There at last, our newest soul reborn!
MYSELF: (A fresh mug risen)
We’ll drink tonight with hearts as light,
To love, as gay and fleeting
As bubbles that swim, on a beaker’s brim,
And break on the lips while meeting.
A brave Bacchus that, who saves the stove from drowning in his sorrow by drowning him in drink.
#
For several days after leaving my room, I see nothing of the captain and think nothing of it, my own seclusion being culprit aplenty. The men rally each other out of one spent tavern and into another with boon to spare, and for naught to the contrary, we’re the only crew in town; only the men on occasion issue from a tavern with such sober haste, it’s plain our commander keeps his separate company, to which we’re not invited. Yes, our supreme lord and dictator is here, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate his most sacred retreat.
Except, there comes a day when I’m at the head of the movable feast; we stumble up the captain and those Sireners with him and excuse ourselves and retreat to the door, an army out-manned if not outnumbered, when he calls out.
“Lad, come. Sit with me.”
I stand still while the others make their exit. “Me, sir?”
As one body, the Sireners move, and now there is only the captain at the table and only me approaching.
“You’ve not earned your name, lad.” He pushes out a chair.
I take the chair, and a mug is supplied beside me. “No, sir. Did they give you one?”
“When you have your name, you’ll know all others. I’d heard tale you disappeared with Ligeia.”
“I disappeared alone for a while but am better now. I think there’s a tavern or two we’ve actually visited twice.”
“Were you ill?”
By his face, I can see he knows I was not, but poorly can I understand the solemnity and whimsicalities of his insight, our own prophet of the wharves and waves. Whatever my apprehension, his look is firm but kind; it seems against all warrantry to cherish such emotions.
“It’s been explained to me,” I say. “The voyage we’ve taken isn’t the voyage that was proposed.”
“As above, so below; all that is, we’ve not supposed.”
“The crew misbelieves that we deliver to one hell, and the Sireners, another; one good and the other evil, when they are, in fact, the same.”
“The great body of the crew is far too barbaric, christianish, and motley to understand the vagaries of truth,” he says. “Even the Sireners have made no attempt to persuade them.”
His description of the crew makes me pause; better men could not readily be found, each in his own way, and they hold him in such lofty admiration. I wonder should the belittling warrant the jolt which rattles me; had I the experience, perhaps it should’ve been expected. He despises the merchant service, but he’s no different; calling each man to serve for a deceptive portion. A captain who renders a lying wage must recite that it’s his crew’s true earnings.
“Was there anything more?” he asks. “Ask anything but the way back home. There may be a going home for some of us, but what way remains, you won’t find it. I’ve journeyed longer than I can remember and wouldn’t be here if disembarking this fate were as easy as sailing into port.”
“My purpose here, sir; I’m told you mean me to fill the role left empty by your fallen first mate.”
For a time he only shakes his head, such that, when finally he answers, the sound of his voice is a relief. “He was an American, a Cape man. It was Christmas, and a ship sailing to escape the winter was capsized by a storm’s rogue wave; all hands lost. A soul or two may escape notice, but that many at once stirs hell’s hunger; the beast caught us in our duty. My first did not survive.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Ligeia was misleading; you are not meant as his replacement.”
In my chest, I feel the bite of polar weather and its merciless winter; no fair wind blows in all the earth, and every morning is gray and gloomy and forever will be.
“I understand,” I say.
He levels his gaze. “You’re meant as mine.”
—Thaddeus Thomas
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