Kraken in a Coffee Cup: 16
Chapter 16
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Table of Contents
If you’re new to the story, I suggest beginning with the table of contents so you’ll understand the origins of the text and why I say it was co-authored by Herman Melville.
And now,
Kraken in a Coffee Cup.
Chapter Sixteen
The men cast loose the tackles and bands of the boat and set her ready; I climb over the rail, still clutching the soft-glowing soul, and those meant to travel with me follow. The boat lowers and nestles in the moonlit waters. The men cast off her ropes and set to rowing.
Behind us, on the Shade, hands clap in rhythm, and voices lift in a song I’d never heard, neither on land nor in all Ligeia’s years in Sirene. Its chanting rhythm feels holy and calm upon this twinkling, flat expanse of sea. The thin, great circle of the atoll grows wider in its brilliance and offers up glimpses of bone-like mounds, palms, and ferns, gathered like an archipelago of tiny oases across the bleached-white sand.
In the shallow, lapping water, the boat grounds itself on coral. To the bewilderment of the crew, I remove my boots and step out, my feet enveloped and protected by Ligeia. We walk onto the beach—the others follow—and we stare out across a lagoon so grand it would take a day to circumambulate. The clear water at the edges becomes gray and then black at the center, a black that seems to me darker than the sky above.
Mr. Graveling, John, and Cooper spread themselves widely, so as to cover a large expanse of beach, with all their eyes again riveted upon the soul.
At Mr. Graveling’s signal, John takes a step closer to the lagoon’s edge and raises his hands like a preacher calling the congregation down from the hymn. “Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull, my little ones,” drawlingly and soothingly calls John across the water. “Pull another home.”
As if in obedience to John’s calling, ripples move across the lagoon, but in widdershins to nature’s order when ripples run out from a sunken object; these ripples run inward, and in the distant center they converge in an uprising of liquid upon liquid, a stationary tsunami, as inches and then inches more of the once-covered shore are left dry. We all walk down a hill of slowly exposed sand and coral as fish dart to keep up with their retreating habitat; ahead, that water rises in a great translucent tower, crowned with three blue spires.
The tower gathers to itself completely, and what I see causes me to question all I’ve known of atolls. To Ligeia, they are a surface feature, beyond her reach, and she is ready to accept as normal if not the gathering of the water than the landscape it reveals, which slopes down to a crater’s edge and drops sharply away into utter darkness; and in that darkness, the water stands, and out of it, it rises. I have heard theories made by a naturalist out of England, that atolls remain after a volcano subsists. No crater should remain, covered or otherwise.
We gather at the edge of the crater’s cliff; several feet beyond, the liquid tower trembles, and reflected in her face is ours looking back at us.
“Throw him in,” calls Mr. Graveling. “Deliver the soul to paradise.”
But Ligeia and I, we hesitate.
What I see brings to mind men of the land with eyes squarely set upon the sea. Circumambulate New York City on a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. These landsmen—of weekdays pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks—now stare back at us. It is their faces we see and not our own, and the revelries are now formed in us, a celebration of the newly arriving soul.
The dead welcome the dead, and I’m ready to give him over as Mr. Graveling is wont for us to do, but for the first time, the unit of mind between Ligeia and myself falters. The faces staring out at us hold no magic upon her, and she shakes me from my spell.
But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. All the souls of paradise gathered for this one. Only, by Ligeia’s shaking, one question rises; why do I envision paradise as a land-born city? If ever there were the markings of a devil’s work, it is this.
Ligeia, not content to toss the soul blindly to its fate, calls up in me the urge to leap. I misunderstand the urge at first and believe it comes from the edge of the precipice, where the fear of falling becomes a desire to jump; but this is different; my thoughts taste different and point to a desired end, not destruction but exploration. She wants to see what waits inside the impossibly aquatic fortress. Graveling urges me again to give the soul to his fate, but instead I pull him closer; and I jump.
We float in the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of paradise. There stand trees, each with a hollow trunk; and here sleeps a meadow; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Despite the scene’s enchantment, the magic means nothing to Ligeia; transparent and pale, what she sees beyond frightens her: ghostly tendrils sparkle with thin blue currents, lightning in place of veins.
I stand among the prairies in June, for scores of miles I wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies; but Ligeia sees through the charm’s thin disguise. The soul in our arms she now absorbs within her flesh, cocooning him there with me; and while I am still half-ready to give myself up to paradise, she readies herself to fight.
My vision flickers, failing against her resolve, and now I see through it to delicately thin arms, like strands of cloud-born moss, to the great transparent flower above us, pulsing as if I stare into god’s own heart. Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Is not the sea the treasure of life’s unknowable mysteries and the witness of god’s power? Ligeia swears I’ve not seen god before, but how can I believe I’m not seeing him again? Look up, for the day of your salvation is at hand!
The denied tendrils twitch, and the blue light within their fibers arcs across the water and burns into our flesh. Pieces of Ligeia melt at every strike. For the human souls within her, the tendrils strike through each black and smoldering injury; pressing into matter, they seek the immaterial and, finding it, release a bright poison into our souls. My will is frozen and dissolved, like a fly wrapped by the spider, and the tendrils draw us up to the pulsating jelly of a mouth in which our souls will be digested; I can see all this coming, but I cannot care. The poison is a deeper depression that I’ve known, even on those days I measured my shoulders against the coffin-maker’s wares. Nothing remains for me in all the earth, and though I face that which can destroy both the body and the soul in hell, I don’t care. Nothing within me weeps. Nothing repents. Even as I watch and wait to die, I feel nothing more than boredom. Let it be done.
This is not an end meant for a Sirener; she moves and wills my limbs to move with her. Tendrils snap in her torn hands. She thrusts hard against the water, and we shoot out of the watery wall and tumble across the dry lagoon floor. Exhaustion grips her, and she loosens her hold upon us. We slide out of her goo like newborns broken from their mother’s sack. The soul lies on the sand beside me, its glow dim, its golden hue a sickly shade of dung.
The great tower collapses and explodes; and a gush envelopes everything in all directions; we roll and tumble in the flood with the earth quaking beneath us. Tendrils lash out with the waves, hungry and hunting, but we have in us now the will to run. I scoop up the soul and sprint across the sand, and when the tendrils take my ankles, I at last follow Graveling’s call. I toss the soul, and it lands in the shallows beyond the atoll’s rim.
It flounders like a tadpole, and John gives chase, like a farmer boy after his pig. The others, recovered from various stages of near drowning, chase with him, calling out in horror each time the soul flops beyond their grasp. At last, they collapse to their knees, beaten and empty-handed, and wail.
The tendrils crawl up my legs and burn into my back, and I believe my soul is forfeit; the tendrils pull me off the sand into what I must assume is only the water of the lagoon, but Lageia engulfs me. Together we break free and stumble out of the atoll and into the judgment of our crew.
Graveling strikes and before the water, I hit darkness.
#
The court-martial is tried on deck, while the sea still seeps from my clothing; and what I first mistake for water running from Ligeia’s wounds, I now suspect is blood. If we die here, I know what will become of my soul. Liegeia’s fate is different, but from our bond, I know what she believes will come.
They are born to witness the afterlife of humanity, and their society has grown to cultivate it, and even after death, they believe their fate remains inexorably linked with ours. When Liegeia loved the Shade’s first mate, he’d become the first outsider to learn the fullness of the Sireners’s religion, and he convinced the crew that— should they not prove to be immortal—his soul would be sent to Sirene.
Such was not to be, but they’d dreamed of an eternity, united as one, for the Sireners see the afterlife as the bonding of their soul with a human’s; and together they transcend the watery plane and ascend to the stars—or something similar if not so literal; a sea beyond the sea, where currents of death and disease cease, and peace and plenty surround them forever.
Death has no promise for Ligeia now; her one true love, destroyed in body and soul. Had it not been for me and the soul we carried, she might not have fought the fate we faced, for this is now the end she desires. Better an end, she believes, than an eternity bound to anyone else but him; but if she dies on this ship, the crew will be honor-bound to return her soul to Sirene. Even if they understood her wishes, they would not risk offending her people; by doing so they would risk their Sheol leave, and without Sirene, they have nothing but ship and sea.
So strongly and metaphysically do I now understand our situation, our fates are intertwined; in a less romantic way than she had envisioned with her love, our own individualities merge in a joint stock company of two; one more mortal wound at the heart of free will. The crew’s ignorance and superstition place us in peril of unmerited disaster and death, an interregnum in providence—assuming its normal reign of even-handed equity never could have so gross an injustice. And yet still pondering, I see this is the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, one has this connection with a plurality of other mortals. If our banker breaks, we snap; if our apothecary sends us poison in our pills, we die. Now we cling to life upon the deck with uncertain strength and are tied to a crew in whose mind we have both defied their god and defiled his heaven. The verdict of death gleams in their eyes.
—Thaddeus Thomas
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