Pirates & Ghosts Short Stories, page 34
“As to the voyage itself, your intelligence will have told you by this time that, thanks to my manipulation, both compasses and chronometers were entirely untrustworthy. I alone worked out the course with correct instruments of my own, while the steering was done by my black friends under my guidance. I pushed Tibbs’s wife overboard. What! You look surprised and shrink away. Surely you had guessed that by this time. I would have shot you that day through the partition, but unfortunately you were not there. I tried again afterwards, but you were awake. I shot Tibbs. I think the idea of suicide was carried out rather neatly. Of course when once we got on the coast the rest was simple. I had bargained that all on board should die; but that stone of yours upset my plans. I also bargained that there should be no plunder. No one can say we are pirates. We have acted from principle, not from any sordid motive.”
I listened in amazement to the summary of his crimes which this strange man gave me, all in the quietest and most composed of voices, as though detailing incidents of every-day occurrence. I still seem to see him sitting like a hideous nightmare at the end of my couch, with the single rude lamp flickering over his cadaverous features.
“And now,” he continued, “there is no difficulty about your escape. These stupid adopted children of mine will say that you have gone back to heaven from whence you came. The wind blows off the land. I have a boat all ready for you, well stored with provisions and water. I am anxious to be rid of you, so you may rely that nothing is neglected. Rise up and follow me.”
I did what he commanded, and he led me through the door of the hut.
The guards had either been withdrawn, or Goring had arranged matters with them. We passed unchallenged through the town and across the sandy plain. Once more I heard the roar of the sea, and saw the long white line of the surge. Two figures were standing upon the shore arranging the gear of a small boat. They were the two sailors who had been with us on the voyage.
“See him safely through the surf,” said Goring. The two men sprang in and pushed off, pulling me in after them. With mainsail and jib we ran out from the land and passed safely over the bar. Then my two companions without a word of farewell sprang overboard, and I saw their heads like black dots on the white foam as they made their way back to the shore, while I scudded away into the blackness of the night. Looking back I caught my last glimpse of Goring. He was standing upon the summit of a sand-hill, and the rising moon behind him threw his gaunt angular figure into hard relief. He was waving his arms frantically to and fro; it may have been to encourage me on my way, but the gestures seemed to me at the time to be threatening ones, and I have often thought that it was more likely that his old savage instinct had returned when he realised that I was out of his power. Be that as it may, it was the last that I ever saw or ever shall see of Septimius Goring.
There is no need for me to dwell upon my solitary voyage. I steered as well as I could for the Canaries, but was picked up upon the fifth day by the British and African Steam Navigation Company’s boat Monrovia. Let me take this opportunity of tendering my sincerest thanks to Captain Stornoway and his officers for the great kindness which they showed me from that time till they landed me in Liverpool, where I was enabled to take one of the Guion boats to New York.
From the day on which I found myself once more in the bosom of my family I have said little of what I have undergone. The subject is still an intensely painful one to me, and the little which I have dropped has been discredited. I now put the facts before the public as they occurred, careless how far they may be believed, and simply writing them down because my lung is growing weaker, and I feel the responsibility of holding my peace longer. I make no vague statement. Turn to your map of Africa. There above Cape Blanco, where the land trends away north and south from the westernmost point of the continent, there it is that Septimius Goring still reigns over his dark subjects, unless retribution has overtaken him; and there, where the long green ridges run swiftly in to roar and hiss upon the hot yellow sand, it is there that Harton lies with Hyson and the other poor fellows who were done to death in the Marie Celeste.
Stuck Velvet
Sophie Elisabeth Francois
It could smell her before it could see her. It could smell her from where she stood on the rocks, her scent diffused in the water. The black viciousness of her sadness came alive in liquid, its sickness dancing like ink turning in a clear glass. It emanated from her like an invisible mist, penetrating the entire ocean like fresh cut onion drawn to eyeball wet. All the sting, the confusion, the tears. It couldn’t see her, but it could smell her, and it could hear the nihilism of her heartbeat, even through the rumbling of the water. Even through the clicking of its beak against the shells embedded in silt, rippling beneath its eternal rope of tentacles.
The heart sounded like stillness. It sounded like emptiness. But mostly, it sounded like defiance. The woman had stood on the rocks for years, almost melted into the landscape. Her dark hair, matted from decades of salt and wind, hung in great waves and fallen ringlets around her face, down the front of her. The tongue of the longest strands flicked at the front and back of knees, caressing the weathered skin. The stone had eroded and grown to rest around her ankles, like grass growing up around the base of a statue, around the bottom of a headstone, one with the words and dates rubbed out. She had impaled herself on the rocks jutting from the grey cliff face many years before. At the time, it had been painful, crushing the soft bottoms of her young feet into the rounded tips of the battered rocks. But now, now the bone had bent around the cold grey foreign body like a train track built around a hill, moss-covered spearhead emerging from the front of her foot like an eye peering through hair, like a reverse Jesus nail, but stuck there just the same. Her skin had turned pale like the stone, blue of cold, blue of dead. The skin and eternally exposed muscle around the miniature exiting stalagmites was a deep brown-red, and twisted like roots of an old tree. A tiny mountain range bordered by a sea of dead flesh. Her toenails had ceased to grow when the beating of her heart slowed and spoke only darkness. They sat on the tops of her frozen toes like perfect puddles of black grease, shining in the moonlight like pools of tar. Ten, minute pools. These toes did not wiggle, no piggies totting to market here. The plates beneath the tiny lakes never shifted.
She sometimes, when the mood struck her or the wind demanded it, and of course today, leaned back and forth, treading weight from one dead foot to the other. It was then that the octopus could hear her bones grinding against one another under her skin like wet denim tautening upon itself. The noise called out to its ears like salted bodies straining against a sheet. Like springs creaking. Like the heel of a hand pushing on a pillow close to an ear. The tibia and the fibula sliding against one another like someone starting a fire. The creaking rang out under the sea like a sunken ship swaying on its anchor, pouring the sound into its head. The suckers on the heaving tentacles puckered, held their breath, and opened back out, flat and yawning for purchase.
The dark eyes, wide and unblinking always, sat in her clean, hard face like two fat pieces of smouldering coin, straight from the forge. Black and orange marbles, rolling around like the dying fight of pinballs in a timeless arcade machine. You couldn’t see the rolling, there was no pupil by which to gauge the movement of the huge eyes, only black rock with molten flecks, but it could hear the rolling. It sang out in the night like the pad of a thumb rubbing gently against a collarbone, back and forth. The slow spin, like falling leaves.
The swaying of her legs moved the curled strings of dark hair back and forth on her chest, exposing her breasts to the sea, high and tight, like Neptune’s wooden angel on the front of a ship. The skin of her chest was pale and thin as tissue paper, shadows of veins visible beneath, fading and bursting forth and meeting and parting like the estuaries of some great river. Her nipples were the same colour as the scar tissue on her feet, purple and red and brown, somehow all three at once. Her lips were that colour too, sitting in her pale face, parted to show only the alabaster tips of her two front teeth. Her top lip rubbed against the teeth as she exposed them in a lazy half-smile, another sound for the octopus. A wet rub, like a cloth on a dirty countertop. Delicate black tendrils curled around the perfect little conch of her ears, the echo of her gut thoughts rolling out into the air, down the side of the mountain, parting the sea like tender soft legs, entering the head of the octopus with all the rest.
For a hundred old money calendar years, she had stood on the side of that cliff, studded herself there, swaying and creaking and aching. Calling out to the sea with every inch of her, inside and out. A day turned into another and another and another, and she would have no idea how long she had been there. Blood streaked her chest and legs like vermillion tears, from nose, and from elsewhere. A century of slowed-down human body going through its motions. Standing in the rain, in the snow, in the mist and sun. Beaten on the rocks like an empty lifeboat.
Her white belly fell and rose almost imperceptibly with the breath that leaked between those front teeth. So slowed down she was that it might have taken her a whole day to inhale and exhale just that one time. Her blood rolled up and around inside her body like the water of a fish tank in transit, catching on and licking at the insides of her veins. The rising and falling of her blood sang out to the creature as a base tone for all the other music of her body. The blood inside her gently hit the wall of the next artery like a head falling back on to a pillow, plumped and full of feathers. This is what the creature heard, once a day in the old money calendar, and tilted its head to the sound.
At some point in the hundred years, the woman had taken to leaning on the rocks behind her, creating a valley of tender skin up the middle of her back. On the days it happened, the song under the sea was like a crackling burst, pressure released as the sharp edges dug in. Someone wringing out a wet towel on dry hands; the skin slowing tearing and creaking, twisted in a way it should not be. Once she settled into the dull pain, she would stay like that for weeks, boulder grating into her once softer flesh.
* * *
Today, twelve hundred moons since she had wept her way to the cliff face and skewered herself there, the creature heard all the sounds at once. They sang out through the wool of the sea, speaking the entire scene directly into its mind. The creaking, the rubbing, the tearing and bursting. The breath and blood, tears running down her face, the salted water tearing a path rang out like a fingernail on a black board. The sounds of two people in one body tore through its brain, the crescendo inside her, and under the ocean, caused its limbs to unfurl from beneath it. Sand rose up in suspended waves as great black muscle propelled the animal along its bed, towards the beach, the rocks, and the woman’s moaning body.
The octopus hit the submerged part of her rock face like a brick wall, dragging all manner of aquatic paraphernalia in its wake. The wave of sand, seaweed and shells, all rode on the slipstream created by the forceful movement of the great creature. Its arms slid up the stone like phlegm in reverse, finding a path, swelling its way toward the light. The woman felt the impact from below her, something in the pit of her stomach quivered, like skin on jolted pudding. She tilted her head back, hair falling away from her marble face, and rolled her black eyes up to the sky. Plump raindrops fell from swollen clouds, hanging above her head like battleship grey silver ash. The one kind of water devoid of salt felt good against her aching skin, a million cold tongues, running down her chest, dripping on to her belly and ivory thighs.
The climbing creature felt cold wind against the first leg to pierce the surface of the water. A different kind of wet. A fresh and empty wet. Water full of air and light, not the muddy, bloodied all-encompassing cloud of vast lake in which it had lived its life. Another limb, and another, rising up out of the water and climbing ever closer to the punctured woman. She felt its closeness, smelt the bottom of the sea in the air around her. One world coming to meet the other. Her mouth watered as her eyelashes fluttered against the weight of the raindrops gathering on them.
The very tip of a tentacle tenderly pressed against her ankle, and she exhaled as deep in her chest a throbbing began. The arm slid up and wrapped around her knee, pushing from the bottom, it grazed the side of her thigh, and slid across her buttocks. It appeared on the opposite side, sliding against the side of her breast and pressing its end against the bottom of her chin. The woman closed her eyes momentarily, and the water from the sky that had weighted in balls to bend her lashes slid down to her chin and met the touch of the snaking black limb exploring there. The tentacle brushed the corner of her mouth, across her cheek, and lost itself in the hair behind her ear.
When the octopus realised that this was the limit of the woman’s body, that this was the end of the blooming mass which had created so much noise in its head, the rest of its arms and legs slid up the side of the mountain and out of the sea, into the world. Without removing its one exploratory hand from behind her ear, it used the rest to hoist its way up the rocks, spreading and filling like thick, black concrete, creeping its way between grids. The woman rolled her black ember-flecked eyes down, and they met with the one white oculus of him. Her saviour. Her consumer.
The creature parted its beak, and flicked its tongue against her ear.
“What do you want?”
The woman’s maroon lips slowly parted all the way along, like the muscles of a piece of meat, separated by a knife. Her breath whispered out like the wet air straight from lungs on a cold day.
“I want to leave with you.”
* * *
The arms slipped upwards. They circled her thighs, the base of one pressing tenderly between her legs as the animal lifted her up and off the spikes to which her feet were fastened. As the rock slipped out, her toes dropped down, and the blood of her legs screeched delicious pain as it started to feel its way through her heels, the palm of her foot, her toes. The scar tissue ached, new electric pressure swelling in the purple chambers.
The woman hung suspended there for an age, rainwater running down off her body and into the mouth of the creature. Eight fat black limbs swirled around her, passing her from one to the other, feeling her body groan under its own weight. Slowly, the creature lowered her down, parting its beak, lifting its tongue to meet the tips of her aching toes. Pulling her down into its mouth, she felt the warm and wet engulf her like sopping velvet. Up to the knee, the waist, the curve of the underside of her bosom. Up to her neck. The inside of its stomach rose up her nose and into her brain, thick like honey, and she exhaled through her wet lips for one last time.
The octopus felt her breath slide out between its own tissue, rising up to the weeping clouds, like a single bubble in a bath tub. It sucked the last of her long black hair down like rogue strings of noodle, and closed its mouth.
* * *
Sitting on the ocean bed some old money calendar years later, the woman and the animal silently spoke of the day she had been plucked. Of the hot rain, the white froth of seawater against the foot of her rocks. Of the pressing of his suckers against her delicate thews. They spoke of it every day for many more years, her bones winching and creaking inside him, her heart beating gently, her blood pulsing slowly. Forever more, the dark marbles of her gigantic eyes tenderly searing scar on to the inside of the home he made for her in his guts.
Heavy Weather
Philip Brian Hall
Any old sailor will tell you the sea is ruled by different gods. A man can’t take the sort of liberties afloat that he might risk ashore. Disrespect the spirits of the deep and they’ll like as not kill you. But every once in a while, they’ll do worse. They’ll let you live.
* * *
The long nine-pounder’s sharp crack was supposed to tell the Dutch captain Welch was losing patience. Naiad’s commander would brook no foreign, sea-lawyering prevarication; in his patrol area his word was law. A warning shot across the bows demanded prompt compliance with the string of colourful flags that fluttered hitherto unacknowledged at the British frigate’s yardarm. Heave-to and prepare to be boarded.
White powder-smoke wreathed around the man-of-war’s port bow and dispersed swiftly in the stiff breeze, its last acrid-smelling wraiths fleeing away over a fleet of choppy, broken-capped waves that scudded north-east in unending serried ranks to an indistinct horizon. The English Channel approaches shivered beneath a sullen, leaden sky. Welch raised his brass telescope once more and scanned the Lieve Vrouw’s decks.
The elderly, bluff-bowed merchantman had simply ignored Naiad’s approach. True, a neutral ship going about its legitimate business might, in normal circumstances, hope to go unmolested. But circumstances were not normal; this was wartime, and in these narrow waters the Royal Navy interpreted international maritime law to suit itself. All the same, enforcing your nation’s mighty will was tricky when the ship in question appeared to have no one on deck.
