by Scott Jäeger
In the low-ceilinged basement of a haberdashery, a Chinese gentleman kept my pipe filled and lit that morning and afternoon while I reclined on an American-made Persian rug. Smoking had never been my preferred indulgence, and though the pipe deadened my need, it did nothing to chase away the images of the weird harbour I had visited the night before. Unsatisfied, I ascended the listing staircase back to the street, where I saw the day had waned enough for a return to the alehouse.
The haze of opium in my mind and tobacco smoke in the air made an unsteady panorama of Elias’s tavern, and in my skull a mallet thumped in time with the cries of the Saturday night crowd. Ordering an ale at the bar, I promptly spilled it on my shoes, a seemingly unbearable injustice. I pivoted on one heel to bellow at the room:
“Has anyone here been to Circo, on the Andalusian coast?”
After a brief lull in the noise, some wag replied, “Yes, I’m out that way in my fishing smack every Tuesday.”
“Didn’t any of you sail in the merchant marine with Eamon Sloan,” I jabbered on, “or fight in the Spanish-American war? Any pirate killers in here?”
The laughter this time was general and enthusiastic, with competing calls to throw me out and to furnish me another drink.
“Wait,” I cried, either to be heard or to calm the disordered thoughts buzzing about my brain. “What about a Captain Bromm?”
At this, the various hurhurhurs fell away. An isolated laugh started to bubble up in an attempt to revive the good humour, but petered out hopelessly.
“Captain Bromm has been dead for ten years,” a fisherman called out soberly, “but speak ill of him here and you’ll meet him sooner than you’d like.”
A discontented rustle circled the room as men shifted in their chairs, uncertain if their pride had been challenged or not. When one of their number stood from a stool at the back, the name Longbottom was murmured in response. The man was not, as I had expected, the crusty old man with the fragrant pipe, simply another fisherman, short, wide, and a little older than his peers.
“All right now,” he said, brushing away the tension with one hand. “Stand down. The young man didn’t come all the way from Arkham to brawl with a bunch of broken-down drunks.”
He pointed for me to meet him at the door.
“I’m done for the night, son,” he said when we were close enough to speak. “Do an old man a favour and walk me back to my bunk, so’s I don’t stumble off the pier on the way.”
Once we were outside he said, “The redoubtable Master Sloan, in the flesh. It has been many a year.”
After taking inventory of my form, he headed east along the docks and I followed. What I at first took for a sailor’s rolling gait was actually a pronounced limp. I had been searching for some evidence of a career at sea, though excepting a tattoo of an anchor I had no idea what that would be.
“You were friends with my uncle,” I said, grasping the fateful envelope in my hand like a talisman.
“Your Uncle Eamon and I were more like brothers. If I had known he was so ill, I would have made the trip to Arkham. But you talk as if you don’t remember me. We met at the estate when you were still a boy.”
I shook my head, doubting I would forget such a figure, however many years had passed.
“Perhaps it’s best if you don’t remember,” he said. “The last time was right around when your parents passed.”
Opening and closing my left hand, I felt the tug where dead tissue resisted living tendon. “What do you know about the fire?”
“That it was a tragedy,” he replied curtly, shrugging himself deeper into his pea coat, “an accident.”
“You’re certain of that?”
“Must’ve been,” he said, more to himself than to me. “A servant forgot to douse a lamp one evening, left it too close to the curtains in the front room. The same woman died in the fire, so it’s safe to say it began and ended with her.”
This news hung in the air between us awhile, and I pushed on.
“Eamon told me about your adventures in the merchant marine. He spent his last night spinning tales of pirates and storms and wrecks. I expect it was heavily embellished, but was any part of it true?”
“Yes, he would have stories to tell.” Longbottom laughed straight from the belly. “What a couple of rovers we were. And to answer your question from Elias’s, yes, we killed pirates. Of course they laughed at you in there. Those fishermen were born into a world of comfort and order. The biggest upset they’ve ever had was trout with their chips instead of cod.”
“But they knew Captain Bromm,” I said. “They jumped up to defend his name.”
“Knew him by reputation. Your uncle told you about Bromm, eh? I envy you that night, Isaac. How I would love to revisit those times.”
“Mrs. Caddock denied that he had any seafaring career at all.”
“That blithering harpy’s still alive?” Longbottom asked, eyebrows raised. “The good die young Isaac, and she’s living proof.”
We walked awhile in silence as I worked myself up to the most important question.
“Uncle Eamon suspected he was being spied upon by enemies from decades ago, that they still pursued him. When the last story was finished, he had a message for me, but fell exhausted before he could finish the thought. I know it sounds ridiculous, but is there actually any threat from the past?”
Longbottom physically shied from the words, as if I had shone a bright light in his face.
“This is what an old sailor calls home,” he said lightly. We had arrived outside a ramshackle fisherman’s hostel and my question was left unanswered. “We’ll talk more tomorrow, eh?”
I watched as he limped from sight. Our conversation had left me acutely dissatisfied, and the mallet in my head had not let up at all. I blame its pounding for driving me straight back to the Chinaman’s drug den. If opium could not return me to my vision of the exotic harbour, I resolved it would smother my uncertainties, if only for a time.
It did smother me, beneath waves of absolute blackness. When they parted, the proprietor was cussing me in Chinese and, when my eyelids began to flutter, in English. Both my funds and my welcome had reached their end.
I ascended from the muggy cellar into the dead of night, a different night from when I had last walked down those steps. I was without a coat, but the cold was to me of no importance. Navigating by the black hump of the church hill, I had been headed for my rented room near the docks when the squat form of a man stopped me in the street. It was Bo’sun Longbottom. He grabbed my arm and began brusquely to steer me on, to a soft bed I hoped, for the blank unconsciousness of drugs had afforded me no rest at all.
“To answer your last query,” he began without preamble, “yes, the Sloans and I have enemies. Makes one cautious.”
He pulled me into a disused doorway and cast about the lane. He was puffing with exertion, though we hadn’t traveled far.
“There was some question as to your identity,” he said.
“You didn’t recognize me, you mean.”
“No no,” he said. “You’re the picture of your Uncle Eamon, minus some sun and a few years of hard work. Listen, there is a little bit more to your uncle’s estate, but I had to be sure you truly were Isaac Sloan."
"Go on," I said, hoping whatever he said next made more sense. He was looking out at the street as if someone had swapped all the landmarks when his back was turned.
"Eamon had a cottage on the outskirts of town. It’s a bit of a hideaway, impossible to find without directions. I'll tell you how to get there, but that is all the assistance I can provide.”
After imparting the directions, he said cryptically, “Remember this, Isaac: to seek is to find, so choose carefully what you seek.”
I did not know how to answer that, but it didn’t matter. The old mariner was already hurrying away.
* * *
Longbottom’s directions led me on a long hike. Gas lamps gave way to the odd candle burning in a window, and candlelight
was succeeded by old-fashioned starshine. I had no torch, but the stars twinkled brightly enough, and the sea breeze helped clear my mind as I made my way towards the cliffs on the west edge of town.
At the top of the bluff Longbottom had described there was a remarkable view of the uneasy sea, but no cottage or shelter of any description. Too exhausted to walk back to my room, I was entertaining a night on rocky ground when I spied a light bobbing at the periphery of my vision. It was not, as I first suspected, someone walking the headland with a lantern, but something like a will o’ wisp. It hovered over the track, low to the ground, and as I watched began to move away.
I did not pause to wonder how something like swamp gas could form there, but on instinct followed. I was led to a different branch of the trail, invisible in the feeble light. After a few minutes, my quarry meandered from the footpath to the edge of the cliff. I approached, cautious of the unguarded drop, until the light descended over the verge and out of sight. Looking down, I saw the track continued along the cliff face. I lowered myself to the ledge, hoping it was the darkness and rising wind that made it seem so narrow. The mystery light, whether the issue of Fate or my disordered mind, had vanished.
The ledge described a gentle slope, ending at a larger stage where the façade of a cottage protruded from the bluff like a dollhouse on a shelf, one window and a narrow door looking out at the horizon. If privacy was what my uncle had sought, he had found the ultimate real estate. The way wasn’t locked, and after a little searching I was able to inspect by oil lamp a tattered couch, a table scattered with cigarette ash, and one larger piece concealed under a sheet, a Chinese medicine cabinet with dozens of small compartments.
The first drawer was empty, but for fluff. The second held a rusty screwdriver, the fourth a rolled up circular from 1913. The fifth was also empty. The sixth drawer would have been the last I tried regardless, for fatigue had all but overcome me. Within it was a long, narrow box, painted with a brightly coloured snake. It did not contain the long stemmed pipe I expected, but several sticks of incense, the scent of which was alluringly similar to that of the Captain’s tobacco.
Setting the incense to burn in an ornate wooden dish which had clearly been used before for the same purpose, I turned the lamp down low and perched on the edge of the couch. Urgency made me tremble as I bent over the table and used a piece of card to wave the fumes towards me.
I inhaled, and after a brief dizziness everything came on clearer than before, with the clean, quiet sharpness of a spring morning. I felt as if the clamor of the Industrial Age, and Man and his problems, had been banished.
When I inhaled more deeply the world dimmed, but not with the oblivion of opium. I reclined on the couch, which rocked like a rowboat in open water. I lay cradled by the waves, each trough deeper and sweeter than the last, until I descended to a realm unknown.
Zij
I woke to a briny wind and the friendly creaking of my hammock as it swayed between two tarry pillars. The air resounded with sailors’ calls and the gulls’ replies, and ships with painted sails like a gypsy’s skirts bobbed in the harbour. This was not Arkham or Boston port. The vessels were all wood, with never an iron-hulled steamer to be seen, and the common goods –coal, lumber, steel– of New England ports were nowhere to be seen. I stood up and blinked several times, but the illusion wavered not a whit. Looking for a shirt to cover myself, I found the grand sum of my possessions to be a linen cloth tied around my hips for modesty.
I walked barefoot along the cool stone wharf, completely, physically within the vision from the tavern. If I suspected that opium had finally driven me mad, I was unafraid. The first man I came upon, unshod and stripped to the waist like me, was working on a block-and-tackle alongside a handsome double-masted schooner. Broad shouldered and brown from the sun, he could have been a stevedore anywhere in the world.
I hailed him in the King’s English and he replied in his own language, a pleasant, lilting tongue that reminded me of Gaelic, or maybe French. I tried to pick out some word or phrase to help me place it as with a vocabulary of gestures he related his problem: he typically used an ox to help shift his cargo, but the animal had died of a fever.
I asked him where I was but the words felt clumsy, like a mouthful of toy blocks, and he continued as if I hadn’t spoken. He had hired two others to help him, but they tired quickly and complained the loads were too much. We spoke awhile longer, and when his hands were busy adjusting the rig I realized I was conversing like a native. Unlike my desultory attempts to speak French while on the Continent, whenever I reached for a word or phrase in this language it inexplicably came to me at once. With this marvel I cast aside the last shred of doubt. I had arrived in that fabled country which I would come to know as the Dreamlands.
“What is the name of this place?” I asked with my new facility.
“Zij,” he replied.
I wished him luck and continued until I spotted a sign of a stick man with a slash on either side, a symbol which in that world meant Men Wanted. There and then, with barely a rag to hide my nakedness, I would begin my new life as a stevedore, New England fading in my mind like a half-remembered dream.
The work – tying knots, shifting loads, lifting, reefing– was not exciting, but I was so happy in it a week had passed before I missed my little brown bottle. I had between worlds shed the damp and dragging cloak of my malaise, and the strongest drug in which I partook was the dockworkers’ raw rum.
The people were generous with their friendship and goodwill. There was always a pipe or a talk to be had. The women were of a kind with the one in my dream, laughing and bold, with the grace of natural born dancers. Their city’s past must have been storied and strange, for there was a distinct division between the cracked and ancient stone buildings, and the newer wood construction which seemed provisional in comparison, as if her residents had all arrived a month before and neglected to bring a carpenter. The resulting skyline looked phony, like a theatre backdrop or unfinished jigsaw puzzle balanced on end.
One lazy evening while I reclined against the low stone wall of the pier, watching the sun drown in magenta waves, I heard the distant lilt of a song coming closer. I closed my eyes to listen and it evolved into the story of a widow and her lost fisherman, a subject common to ports everywhere. Yet I had heard this particular song before, and in that same spot. Knowing this, I was unsurprised when the girl from my pipe-dream strolled by, so close her sleeve brushed my shoulder, carrying a dozen bolts of cotton. She had a lithe figure, delicately slanted almond eyes, and raven black hair, a colour I had never seen on another head since I had come to Zij.
“Your gaze is bold,” she said, stopping abruptly. “Are you a labourer, or some kind of tout?”
“A tout?” I laughed. “I work for my living.”
“That’s what you call work. Is it so arduous sitting by the water ogling girls?”
“Not you, my dear.”
She wiped her brow, rested her bolts of cloth on the half-wall, and studied me skeptically. She must have seen something worthwhile, for she said, “You’ll see no more like me today so why not make yourself useful?”
I took up her bundle and while we walked I learned her name was Isobel, and was invited to dinner at the Iron Street apartment she shared with her father. Their home was so close to the wharf I imagined salt spray coming in at the window. Though every angle was askew, from cabinet to doorframe to ceiling, their three simple rooms showed the fastidious housekeeping habitual to mariners.
“Isaac Sloan, sir,” I said to the man. He was lean and weathered, with midnight black hair becoming streaked with grey.
“Solomon,” he replied.
“Isaac has been working as a stevedore on the Gull Street pier,” Isobel said to him, passing me a cup of sour red wine.
“There’s no lower man on the docks than a stevedore, and never a better way to learn them, from the bottom up.” Solomon hoisted his cup in salute.
“And what is your line?”
I asked.
“Retired,” he said. Isobel tried and failed to stifle a giggle, and with a mock scowl Solomon amended, “Almost retired, from the shipwright’s guild. I was planning to spend my last days drunk on rum and playing dominoes with the other fossils in the bazaar, but my partners say I’m too valuable. Years back I designed a cutter with a reinforced hull. Made other men a fortune. My reward has been their high esteem, and constant badgering."
Solomon withdrew a battered book the colour of a wine stain, pausing to briefly rest his palm on its cover. The atlas fell open to a meticulously annotated entry on the Island of Oriab.
“Now, Stevedore, if I don’t miss my guess you’ve not been long in Zij. I sailed far in my youth, but I’ve never heard an accent quite like yours. Where do you hail from?” He flipped among the pages. Every map was decorated with small paintings of the different races of the Dreamlands. “Far Celephaïs, perhaps? From the north, Inganok? Surely not here.” His blunt finger stopped at an area along the coast to the south. Though not so far from Zij, it was deliberately blank.
“Nowhere in your book, I’m afraid. I sailed farther than I had ever dreamed, and arrived without a crust of bread to my name.”
“Hmph.” He set the book aside, again stroking its cover as if reluctant to part from it.
“I enjoy working on the docks, but I’d like to try my hand at crewing,” I said. “Do you know any vessels in need of a strong back?”
“There’s more money in crewing,” Solomon replied, “but what do you know of ships and the sea?”
He paused to tamp a plug of tobacco into a small, hand-carved pipe while I considered my two drowsy trips across the Atlantic.
“Not much,” I said, and to myself, “nothing beyond my uncle’s stories of Captain Bromm.”
“Bromm?” he said, drawing fire to his pipe. “Doesn’t sound like any captain of the Southern Sea. Anyroad, Captain Harrog is shorthanded. The Asphodel is his ship.”
