Kraken in a Coffee Cup: 7
Chapter 7
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 Seven
Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, hidden houses on either hand, and here and there a glob of glowing flesh twitching, like a candle in a tomb. Beyond, the city rises, as if patterned on a scorpion’s tail, to an obscured peak, 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 came 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. My first impression is 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, warming 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.”
(Go to Chapter 8.)
—Thaddeus Thomas
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