Ahab's Return: or, The Last Voyage

by Jeffrey Ford

  I took solace in the cover of night. Another minute passed and I was envisioning finding them all with their throats slit, or worse, their heads cut off like poor Rufus, when the door swept back and there stood Arabella wearing her white muslin writing garb, holding a pen in her left hand and exuding the aroma of the poppy. In her right hand was a pistol. Her eyelids were only half open and when she saw us she broke into a wide smile.

  “Who goes there?” she said and stepped aside for us to enter. She led us down into the parlor. Mavis was already there, sitting on the yellow couch, her hands clasped across her stomach and her hat tilted back.

  “There’s stew in the kitchen,” said Arabella. Madi went to help himself and she followed him.

  I reached into my jacket pocket and retrieved the two envelopes, one with my Malbaster dream and the other the tale of the Indian Caves. When I handed them to Mavis, I said, “I need the old man to follow me on the order of these two.”

  “He’s been somewhat steamed lately,” she said. “He was complaining that you’re never at your desk. He hasn’t seen you in an age. What’s this article you refer to about?”

  “My meeting with Malbaster.”

  “You met him?”

  “No, but the subject seemed like something I could make hay with.”

  Mavis raised her eyebrows. I knew that wasn’t a good sign, but shrugged it off. Garrick could give me a tongue-lashing when it was most convenient for him. I didn’t care. At that point, I’d have just been happy to make it through our ordeal alive. I reached into my trouser pocket and pulled out the sweaty dollars I owed Mavis. I counted out the bills as I handed them to her.

  “Good?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Are you staying here?” I asked.

  “Are you joking?”

  “You think we’re in danger staying here?”

  She smiled. “I like to keep moving.”

  “It’s going to be tough for us to get out of here with Ahab’s son if something happens.”

  “You need to plan to always be planning,” she said.

  I laughed.

  “The boy has the jibbering sweats.”

  “He’s unwell?”

  “Puking his guts up into a bucket,” said Mavis. The thought of it made me woozy.

  “Do me a favor, when you’re in my neighborhood, look in on Misha. Let me know if anything seems amiss.”

  She nodded.

  “Keep a tally and I’ll even up with you when the entire gambit is over. We just have to pray that Garrick doesn’t fire me.”

  “I don’t pray,” she said.

  I promised her I’d have another article for her in three days. She left and I locked the door behind her.

  Madi and I sat in the kitchen, eating stew. I wanted to say to him that I couldn’t clear the image of Sharde’s decapitated head out of my own, and somehow, I knew he wanted to tell me the same, but neither of us mentioned it. Instead he told me he thought we’d made some good progress on the West Side.

  “What are you talking about? That was a disaster,” I said.

  “Irony, Harrow. You don’t recognize your own tools?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “Everything I write is emotionally true. And here’s a truth for you. It’s imminent that we’re going to be overrun here by the Jolly Host. They’ll swarm upon the walls, break through the windows, and slither down the chimney.”

  “We have to get out of here,” he said.

  “That’s what Mavis said. Keep moving.”

  We made a bond that while one of us slept, the other would remain awake to be vigilant against the Host. The thought of being attacked made the spacious home feel claustrophobic. Since returning there, the urge to run throbbed like a drumbeat just beneath the thin layer of my rationale. When Madi left the kitchen to lie down for his hours, I headed to Arabella’s writing room. I hesitated for a moment and then knocked on the door.

  “Harrow, you may enter,” she called.

  I wondered how she knew it was me. I opened the door into the blue room and I couldn’t make out a thing through the yellowish-white fog. I took a deep breath, closed the door behind me, and dove in. I swept my arms through the swirling smoke and headed toward where I knew she’d be—at the low table, sitting cross-legged on a large cushion.

  Eventually, there was a brief break in the cloud cover, and I found Arabella hard at work, the pen looping and scratching out her vision that, according to her, arrived so rapidly that to think would slow her down and she’d lose the story.

  I took the same seat as I had last I was there, in the chair across from her. “I want to speak to you, Arabella.”

  “Speak,” she said. Her eyes did not meet mine, but stayed trained on the paper, assiduously tracking the relentless progress of words.

  “I’m worried you might not be ready for what’s coming,” I said.

  “What’s that?” Still her hand moved.

  “The Jolly Host. It may only be days, hours, minutes, before they’ll be sweeping through this place, beating, skewering, and shooting us.”

  “I’m ready.”

  “How can you be ready? When you greeted us tonight, you seemed more than half asleep on opium. Do you think it’s truly a good idea to be smoking it in this house, what with Ahab’s son trying to wrestle free of the drug’s grasp?”

  “It can’t be avoided,” she said.

  “Why? Are you also addicted?”

  “No. I can’t get addicted. My body reacts to it in a different way than most people’s.”

  “Isn’t that what all the addicts say?”

  “It’s true, Harrow. I’m not making it up.”

  “What’s the difference?” I asked and already I began to feel a slight effervescence at the edge of my consciousness. My mouth went instantly dry.

  Keep in mind, she continued writing throughout this entire exchange. “I can resist its negative aspects and use it to nourish and open the seed casing of my mind,” she said.

  I had to try not to laugh. “Is that really important now, considering all that’s happening?”

  She stopped and laid the pen down on top of her pages. I could make out through the fog that the ink she used was violet. She stretched and yawned and in that moment was perhaps the most beautiful as ever I’d seen her. “Look, Harrow. I know what I’m doing. Do you really want to know what that is or would you rather simply trust me?”

  “I’d feel better if I knew,” I said. With those words, the blue walls began to undulate and it seemed we were all at sea. The stars were slowly showing themselves and somehow she was now snuggled next to me as the tiny craft we were in was lifted and lowered by the gentle surf.

  “If you must know, I’m trying to reassert myself over the character of the manticore. We need the creature on our side. I’m laying a trail of blood and drawing her back into my fiction.”

  “And for this you need the smoke?”

  “It helps me achieve the state I need to cast my story spell.”

  “How did Malbaster wrest it from you to begin with?” In my mind’s eye, I saw the island Arabella had told me about where her heroine, Seraphita, was washed ashore and transformed into the manticore.

  “It must have been through the boy, Gabriel. Time has no direction on the astral plane. Malbaster’s effect on the boy has an effect upon his father, who is tied together with me in our current venture. The Pale King Toad explored the cosmos of this, our story. Saw my creation and snatched it with impunity.”

  “Very well,” I said, my legs trembling as I stood. I was slightly dizzy from the smoke of her exhalations, and I knew if I didn’t escape at that moment, her explanations would tie my thoughts in knots. It was better I left while I still realized she had lost her grip on reality.

  “Do you see what I mean, Harrow?” she said, lifting the pen and beginning to write again.

  “Interesting,” I said. When I got out in the hallway, I leaned against the wall for a
minute, taking deep breaths. I had promised Madi I’d stay awake for four hours while he slept. After five minutes with Arabella, I was ready to lie down and succumb to the sleep of unreason. My nightmares made more sense than her theories, and at the very least I could hide from our troubles. Mavis’s words came back to me, and I repeated in a whisper, “Keep moving.” I pushed off the wall and went in search of Ahab to get a report on the boy.

  I knocked on the half-open door of the room in which Gabriel was our prisoner/patient. Ahab answered in a weary voice, “Come in.” I entered and took a seat by the end of the bed. The captain was wringing out a wet rag. He placed it flat upon his son’s forehead. The boy looked terrible—an ashen complexion, heavy-lidded eyes half open above puffy dark circles. I noticed a bucket of vomit and a nasty aroma, an amalgamation of puke and sweat and fear. Every now and then Gabriel gave a violent shudder.

  “I’m no doctor, but he doesn’t look tip-top,” I said.

  “Harrow, always a master of understatement,” said Ahab. He was finally free of the coat we’d taken off the dead man at the Indian Caves and now wore a billowy white shirt patterned with violets.

  “Have you slept, Ahab?”

  “I doze off and on. Trying to keep the boy comfortable. The worst part has been wrestling him out to the outhouse. My God, what a task. He can barely stand.

  “We’re in the heart of the squall now,” he said. “Another day of this hellish withdrawal and we should begin our ascent out of the darkness. I swear, Harrow, it’s like he’s possessed by an evil spirit. After he comes around, the hard part will be to keep him off the poison. I’ll stay by his side as long as it takes.”

  I didn’t mean to say it, but I felt it. “You’re a good man, Ahab.”

  “No, mate. I’m a bad man trying to do good.”

  “As you wish,” I said. “By the by, your fashion sense is stunning. That shirt is something.”

  “Arabella made it for me from a dress left behind here by a very large housekeeper she once had. Took the scissors to it and a needle and thread and turned a circus tent into a nicely fitting top for me. She also combed my hair.”

  “Your beard’s coming back,” I said.

  “So it is. She asked if I wanted a shave as well, but I’d already put the poor woman out with all our mess.”

  “To tell the truth, Captain, I think, minus the fact that her man, Otis, took that arrow to the noggin, she’s enjoying this venture more than just about anyone else. More than me, I can assure you.”

  “I don’t know if I’m enjoying this. But I’m thankful for the chance to be with my son.” Ahab turned his gaze to the dozing boy. “I spoke to him about his mother both while he was awake and asleep, and I told him about my life at sea. When he’s awake, he no longer fights me, but simply stares, watching my mouth moving and listening to the words pouring forth. As of yet, he’s spoken no civil word to me. But he hasn’t called me a ghost in at least half a day.”

  25

  I had hours to wait before Madi would relieve my watch, so I sat with the captain. We didn’t converse but listened instead to the boy’s breathing overlaid by the sound of the winter wind howling outside the windows. Somewhere in those longest minutes of the night, Gabriel suddenly awoke with a fit of coughing. The noise roused me from my stupor. I’d not gone to sleep, but I might as well have. I’d lost track of how long I sat there, a citizen of the vegetable kingdom. My brief encounter with the opium engendered in me a weariness that sleep couldn’t touch.

  The boy seemed to be upset about something. It was painful to see Ahab attempt to administer to his son. This tough, gruff old sea captain was at a loss when it came to tending a sick child. Eventually Gabriel quieted and sank back into slumber.

  The sounds of breathing and the wind returned. Ahab leaned close to the now sleeping Gabriel. His lips were moving, and I heard a low murmuring, but it was difficult to make out what he was saying. I watched as Ahab wrapped his son in words, the way a doctor would treat a wound with bandages, and my mind wove a story from those faint sounds.

  Ahab filled the boy’s head with images of the great green ocean in both fair and foul weather. There was much talk about the sun, and an entire story wherein the starry constellations walked and breathed at night above the ocean. The captain was haggard, and yet he droned on with determination, casting his spell. He leaned his elbows against the edge of the bed with his hands clasped and his forehead resting upon them.

  I’m almost certain he spoke about the most beautiful spot on Earth—a sea cave, its stalagmites and stalactites studded with chunks of crystal that lit like stars when the morning sun slipped into the opening at low tide. There were pink starfish in the knee-high surf and green seal-like creatures that swam around and through a visitor’s legs. Ancients had left an altar there hundreds if not thousands of years earlier and the legend had it that if you were to leave an offering of fish or flowers, your life would be blessed with serenity. This place was on a small atoll a hundred and fifty miles due east of New Caledonia and the same distance southwest of Fiji.

  Apparently, he was taken there by a group of Brits canvassing the islands of the Pacific, looking for exotic plants in order to gather seeds and specimens for Kew Gardens, the Royal Botanical Society. They’d allowed Ahab to join their expedition as long as he was willing to pitch in with the work on board ship, and if he was patient with their studies and their searching, they promised to drop him as far east as the Pitcairn Islands, where eventually an American ship would stop on its way back to Boston. For one with few funds and no position to bargain, the captain took them up on their offer.

  The story snaked its way back into that beautiful cave and from somewhere in Ahab’s mumbling I became aware that when the grotto lit with the morning sun, a voice would rise out of the ancient altar and the spirit of a creature on two legs and sporting long flowing hair, the strands of which were imbued with volition like the limbs of an octopus, would be seen to walk away upon the water. I saw all this as he carried on with his incantatory telling. There were swirling colors and a rising tide that might trap them in the cave. And I feared being trapped in the cave myself. I dove into the water to swim for it and soon found I could breathe even though submerged. The water slowly became the night and stars and I was floating, turning slowly head over heels, and . . .

  “It was here that I learned the secret to life,” Ahab said to his son. I woke suddenly and before opening my eyes, I thought of Madi and how I’d let him down. At that instant, someone smacked me across the face with the back of his hand. The blow stunned me and chased my consciousness to the brink of darkness. Still, I hung on and opened my eyes and caught sight of Bartleby leaning over me, a glimmering string of drool descending from the corner of his lips toward my open mouth. He had a knife in his hand.

  He raised the weapon, and in the moment that followed I saw how he’d been patched since our last encounter with him. The gash Madi had left in his throat had been rudely sewn shut, and ropy scar tissue, whiter than his already deathly pallor, marked where cuts and scrapes had healed without medical attention. He stank like an old foot. What was he? I saw the knife descending and brought my knee up as hard as I could, smashing him in the balls. The knife altered its course and went wide, sticking into the back of the chair.

  I shoved him with all my might and he reeled backward across the room. I noticed Ahab was no longer in his chair and Gabriel was gone from the bed. I was stunned by the thought that my weakness might have cost us all our lives. Bartleby gathered his haphazard deathless energy and came at me again. I heard windows breaking in the distance and fire crackling, and I smelled smoke, this time not the poppy. I stood, trembling, and prepared to meet him in battle.

  That’s when I heard Arabella’s voice behind me. “Duck, Harrow,” she yelled. I had been staring at the emaciated bone-shop horror that was my assailant, frozen in fear and had only just lowered my head when I heard the gun go off. With the first shot, Arabella blew off a chunk of Bart
leby’s forehead and forced him backward. I bolted from the chair and moved toward her. She told me to duck again as she aimed her double-barrel pistol. As crumbling brain matter fell out of the ragged wound, Bartleby stumbled toward us like a feeble old man looking for the bathroom in the middle of the night.

  She put the second bullet square in the middle of his face and that knocked him over. I felt her hand on my shoulder, and she pulled me with her through the house. We made it to her writing room and she shut the door behind us and locked it. I noticed that the low table she worked upon was kicked over and revealed an open trapdoor. “Hurry, Harrow, they’re waiting for us,” she whispered.

  “What about Madi?” I asked. “Did you get him?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Did you think me some dithering opium addict fallen asleep on the job?” She was loading two more percussion caps into the pistol. “Now move or they’ll be upon us.”

  I started down the set of steps leading through the rectangle of darkness in the floor. Arabella followed closely, after shutting the trapdoor behind her. When we reached the bottom of the steps, she said, “Straight ahead. It leads to the stable.” I put on speed and eventually tripped forward onto a set of steps ascending out of the darkness, putting us in the stable with the coach-and-four. Madi stood at the top of the stairs holding a lantern.

  “You’re in the coach, Harrow, with Miss Dromen and the boy,” he said.

  Arabella asked him, “Did you bring George’s satchel and my notebooks?”

  “They’re in the coach,” he said.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” she asked.

  He nodded and went to his horse, which was saddled and waiting for him. Then I noticed that Ahab was on the driver’s bench of the coach, and an intuitive sense of uncertainty flashed across my mind. Madi’s match went out. Arabella and I scrambled into the coach and pulled the door shut. A match flared to life in her fingers, and I saw Gabriel huddled in the corner shivering.

  “Now,” she yelled and I heard the great doors of the stable sweep open. We began to move. As we turned left on Bayard, I heard the hoofbeats of Madi’s mount head off to the right. The next I knew, we were jostling and bouncing through the night at top speed. It was hard to hear with the racket of the coach traveling over rough road, but I was too nervous to stay quiet.