The Kraken Sea

by E. Catherine Tobler

  Jackson’s needs, however, did expand northways. He thought of north when he went to sleep. He thought of north when he got up each morning. He spent evenings on the roof, wondering if he could make it there by rooftops alone, so none might know, and when he found the metal catwalk connecting Macquarie’s to another building, he rejoiced. Every day worked him to exhaustion, but he ventured to the roof every night, daring to cross the catwalk high above the streets below. The roof of the building led to another and this to another, and he traced his way to the building opposite what must be Bell’s, but could not reach Bell’s itself. Not this way.

  He took to sitting on the catwalk in most of his natural form. He could take his shoes off and let his feet fall into the coils they wanted to be. He reminded himself to roll his trousers to his thighs and control the change so he wasn’t constantly ruining what few clothes he had. Cressida would have understood; she had told him to be what he was without shame or doubt, but he always remembered the foundling hospital and the constant lack of everything. His circumstances had changed, but he treasured all he had been given, not throwing it carelessly away simply because he could.

  He watched as customers left Bell’s in the small hours of morning, would smell the change in the air as warm bodies left close spaces. They smelled of smoke, liquor, and perfume. Of sweat and things Jackson could not put a name to. They left singly, and in pairs, and sometimes in trios. He watched as the windows of upstairs rooms brightened with gas- and candlelight, figures twining together, then parting.

  He wondered which room was hers. If she brought anyone back with her, if it was part of her job or simply a pleasure she took. He wondered if she could see him, if she watched Macquarie’s the way he watched Bell’s.

  Only once did he see her, one early morning on the street that would lead her to Macquarie’s. Was she looking for him? The idea was absurd, but it made him smile. It wasn’t Macquarie’s she went to, vanishing instead into Kotler’s Bakery. She emerged later with a neatly tied package that revealed itself to be palmiers when she untied the blue ribbon. The pastries vanished one by one into her mouth and he thought oh to be so sweet, that she might swallow me, that I might dissolve upon her tongue.

  One block south of Macquarie’s, Chinatown sprawled. He followed Foster into the teeming streets and focused on not staring too long at any one thing, for fear he would miss the next captivating person or place. He chafed at not being allowed to go far on his own, but was thankful for Foster the deeper they roamed. Cressida didn’t formally claim these streets — Foster said she couldn’t, if she wanted to stay on good terms with the Chinese — however good portions of them were under her dominion and protection even so.

  Inventory from small shops spilled out onto the sidewalks in baskets, on tables and rugs, lining wood shelves. Any food Jackson could imagine and most he could not were easily found, from roasted ducks gleaming in windows, to neatly arrayed steamed buns filled with sweets or savories. They stopped at one vendor to collect a payment and the man included a paper sack filled with fried merelings. Jackson took them for squid or shrimp, which they were often hauled in with, until he tasted them and found them saltier beneath the fried breading. Mermaid tails, Foster told him, were a delicacy anywhere. Jackson crunched through another and could see why.

  The building they headed toward was a compact three stories. Most of the buildings in Chinatown were smaller, Jackson saw, unless the building was a pagoda. Foster explained how important this building was, noting its glossy lacquered doors, blue columns, and seafoam green roof tiles. Everything about the building spoke to its importance amid the darker storefronts that filled the rest of the street. Iron lions crouched beside the entry, but they knew Foster, and bowed their heads, allowing them entry.

  It was a simple transaction inside a room smelling of salt water, its walls lined with gurgling tanks. The tanks held creatures Jackson wanted to inventory: octopus and fish with rainbow scales, live merelings, infant krakens. The merelings were bigger than those Jackson had just eaten, enough older that they were aware of the world outside their tank; their small hands pressed to the glass and they watched.

  The leader of the tong, the honorable Lee Jun-fan, bowed before Foster and offered a slim envelope crafted from brocaded silks of gold and blue. Foster did not open it, but plainly knew by the weight he had been given the correct payment. There was only relief in Lee’s eyes when Foster smiled and offered a bow in return. Jackson watched, understanding this man was indebted to Cressida and her people.

  “The Widow sends her regards to your honorable family,” Foster said, “and assures you the pestilence of recent weeks will have passed into the west, as does the setting sun each evening. The ocean swallows such filth and it is never seen to rise again.”

  Lee bowed again. When he crossed his arms over his chest, his hands curled into his tunic. “The Widow is truly kind in her provisions. Does she require …”

  One hand unknotted to gesture to a tank with a kraken inside. The beast looked made of stone until it moved. One looping tentacle curled up and out of the water, to delve into the neighboring tank where it scooped out a mereling. The mereling shrieked, its violet and green scaled tail flicking water as it thrashed in panic. The mereling went silent, pulled under the waters of the kraken’s tank, then vanished in a poof of blood.

  “Not at this time,” Foster said with a slight shake of his head. “Of course, should she require such, one of us will return.”

  Foster didn’t introduce him to Lee, and Jackson didn’t question it. Lee seemed about to quake out of his shoes. Jackson had little doubt he would be remembered by the man if Cressida or Foster sent him alone here. When they left the building, Foster opened the brocade pouch to pour golden fish and skulls into his palm. Foster didn’t count what he had been given, only handed Jackson the empty pouch and began to eat the gold. He didn’t chew, just set each piece on his tongue and swallowed.

  “Pretty neat trick.”

  The voice came from across the street. Jackson’s attention snapped that way, taking in the four young men who approached. Other pedestrian traffic in the street peeled back as they crossed the road. They were young and though white, looked to spend their days consumed by hard work. Their hands were rough, their shoulders broad, as if they lifted shipping containers at the docks from sunup to sundown.

  “Samuel,” Foster said and bowed at the waist, as if greeting a friend.

  Another of the young men spoke, a condescending laugh edging his words. Jackson recognized the tone from his time in the foundling hospital. “Too bad he can’t shit them back out — either way, getting it back won’t be pretty.”

  “Duncan,” Foster said and Jackson watched him bow again. Calm, welcoming.

  Jackson didn’t know what they meant by shitting the gold out, but the lack of pretty made itself apparent when the boys lunged, fists flying. Maybe they meant to rip the money out of Foster; Jackson wasn’t going to wait to find out.

  Instinct took over and it didn’t matter how old these men were, how big, or where they were in the city. Jackson let the transformation come. He thought sure the Chinese had seen stranger and if he meant to eat these young men, it didn’t matter what they saw. His gaping maw and then the blackness. That was all there would be.

  He had seen plenty of brawls, but his fights in the foundling hospital had chiefly been one on one. Once the kids discovered the strength behind small fists that were no longer small fists but slapping coils, they didn’t approach. This, two on four, was a strange concept, made easier when Foster moved to divide the four into two, so they each might take a pair. Samuel and Duncan moved for Jackson, leaving Foster the other two.

  But Foster, Jackson saw, was not entirely Foster; he too had changed, human form shifting to something Other. Gone was his tidy topknot, gray hair having swallowed his head and shoulders. Foster was a fierce thing, looking part dragon, part dog, the knot of hair having become a single sharpened antler Foster slashed toward the
two men nearest him.

  The admiration Jackson knew was strange. In the foundling hospital, no one had stood beside him. When conflict came, most ran if they weren’t the instigators. Fighting with someone as opposed to against them was something Jackson could hardly comprehend.

  When his fist hit Samuel, it was only a fist, slamming into cheek and jaw. But Jackson quickly dissolved fingers into coils, lashing them around Samuel’s throat to keep him from toppling to the ground. Held at a slight distance, Samuel couldn’t even gather breath to scream.

  Wading into the fight, Duncan drew a pair of knives from his belt. Jackson would have thought him more timid, but he didn’t hesitate. Hesitation was death; the orphan in Jackson knew it the way he knew breathing, the way he knew the bite of the blades as Duncan slashed out with both. Jackson’s hold on Samuel tightened, but his choked breath didn’t deter Duncan.

  Blades whirled and gleamed in the gaslights like a dozen angry snakes. Disregarding them, Jackson lunged forward, using Samuel as a shield, hoisting him into Duncan. The knives flashed down, away, the weakness Jackson sought. Jackson pressed the advantage, snapping one leg coil around Duncan’s legs. From the back, Jackson pulled and sent him sprawling to the street. With Duncan down, Jackson thrust Samuel into the blades.

  Samuel sucked in a gurgled breath as he went down, but the damage was done. Fresh blood welled through Samuel’s shirt and Jackson was only satisfied to see it, evidence of his job well done. He could nearly taste the blood in the air and dipped his head closer.

  “You know the price for coming into these streets,” Foster snarled to the quartet through his fanged mouth. The two men he had fought staggered back, slashed and bleeding as Duncan tried to pick Samuel up. Jackson stared at the blade in Samuel’s side, at the sudden pale cast to his skin. Samuel would be cold soon and wouldn’t care.

  Duncan spat blood in Foster’s direction. “You tell the Widow —”

  “Nothing.” Foster shook his head, calm as a lake in the middle of winter. With the head shake, some semblance of humanity returned to him. The antler melted away, fur retreating as skin came to the fore. But that skin was streaked with blue blood carrying a strange, oily tang. “You are beneath the Widow’s worries. You have no place in this city. Like the rats, you simply don’t know it yet. You will sink into the sewers and be swallowed by the floods.”

  Jackson drew himself into his normal skin, but it was difficult with blood everywhere. He wanted to swallow all four of the men and when Foster let them hobble off, Jackson spat and snarled.

  “You let them go?”

  Foster turned, humanity restored, the sealing of a mask back into place. “Samuel, James, Duncan, and Theo,” he said, calmly scraping his sweat-slick hair back from his face. He coiled his hair back into a knot, dark eyes surveying Jackson all the while. “The Bell brothers.”

  Bell’s is two blocks north, she had said. Two blocks north … where their business did not extend. Jackson clenched his teeth, matters becoming more clear to him.

  “The Widow wants them dead, make no mistake,” Foster continued. He nodded up the street the way they had come and Jackson fell into step beside him. People were beginning to reemerge from their homes and businesses. “But not like this.”

  “Then how?” Jackson glanced back at the blood splattered in the street. Already merchants were bringing buckets of water to wash it away, as though it had never been.

  Foster’s mouth moved into the shadow of a smile. “In careful ways, young Jackson. Their father is wrathful, like you have not seen, and he would move against her should she give him an opening. He would have her territory, he would have her …” Foster’s thin shoulders moved slightly beneath his tunic. “Everything.”

  Back inside Macquarie’s, Foster bent to the floor, doubled over as if in pain. But there was only joy as he spat the golden skulls and fish onto the rug. Jackson slid a hand over the man’s shoulder, wishing to comfort him if he might, but Foster shook his head and kneeled there, smiling darkly. The scent of hot metal rose thick around them.

  Later, Jackson supposed he might understand, how holding a thing for a while could give a person pleasure; while later spitting it out could do the same. It was much the same way with him and his forms. Some days, there was pleasure in denying what he was. As he undressed in the low lights of his room, he also came to understand exactly what those boys tonight had been about. They hadn’t wanted to kill anyone. They wanted to know what they were up against with the new kid.

  Jackson supposed that now, they knew.

  §

  North of Macquarie’s, the city block ran straight, up a hill and over, but before one went over, there sat Bell’s, a building as impressive as Macquarie’s, if wholly different. Where Macquarie’s was the color of broken earth, Bell’s was the color of a clouded sky, white streaked with gray. This sky had never known blue, only clouds. Every window and corner was marked with wrought iron, the metal carrying into the lettering above the doors, between gas lamps spilling amber light everywhere.

  Two ivory gargoyles framed the main door, the people streaming into the venue passing under the arching wings. Jackson wondered if these people knew the gargoyles were alive; he watched their eyes as the beasts watched the crowd, counting every person who went in, assuring each paid their entry fee. A boy younger than Jackson tried to slip past, huddled in the shadow of an older man.

  The gargoyle on left made the move, snatching the child from the mass of patrons, causing the others to draw back with shrieks. Jackson was captivated by the way the gargoyle lifted the kid toward its mouth. Surely the gargoyle didn’t mean to —

  The kid vanished into the gargoyle’s stony maw, his terrified shriek cut off midway through. Jackson expected blood, expected something, but all was silence until the crowd milled forward again, making their payments unquestionably visible to the creatures. The gargoyle tucked itself back into place and Jackson envisioned the kid, in the black of the beast’s belly. What else was in there?

  Cressida paid him a reasonable wage, and saw too he had spending money. She didn’t mind him exploring the city — wanted him to learn its ways — but he didn’t tell her he was going to Bell’s. Based on what the girl had said to him, he worried there was something more at play here.

  He paid his coin to get in and expected some hassle; expected the hawker at the door to tell him he was too young, he was too poor, he was too something, but they ushered him in alongside the others.

  “Think she’ll be here?”

  “Of course she’ll be here.”

  Jackson’s thoughts went straight to the girl from the roof. His throat tightened at the idea she would be like the dancers Cressida employed. Translucent and spread for all to see. Something inside him rebelled at this idea. She wasn’t like those dancers, a thing for men to —

  His mind wouldn’t go there (though of course it already had, and slowly, over the curve of her cheek and mouth, thinking back to that longed-for kiss). She could very well be here for that reason. Women in the city were scarce. It was one reason Macquarie’s packed in crowds every night. Hardworking men needed their diversions after long days, didn’t they? Warm spaces, inhabited by women who took on the guise of living works of art; women more liquid in their motions than solid, bending as one would bend them. Curls of cigar smoke, deep snifters of brandy, and shadows deep enough between the candlelit spaces that one didn’t care what another did.

  Bell’s was nothing like Macquarie’s. A foyer led to three sets of double doors, and these opened into a vast theater with rows of seats on a balcony level, and clustered tables on the lower level. While men streamed up curving staircases toward the balcony, Jackson threaded his way through the crowd, wanting to be as close as possible to the half-moon stage filling an entire far wall.

  White velvet curtains poured from the ceiling, pooling on the polished cherrywood stage, globes of gaslights tracing a ring around the stage’s outer edge. Above the stage, a myriad of cords and cables
dangled, while a small orchestra occupied a pit in the floor just beyond the stage’s outer edge. Jackson wondered if performers would fly on the cables, but amid the jostling for position, and the music, he didn’t ask. The curtains parted and the crowd erupted.

  Jackson counted each woman as they came onto the stage, each more lavishly costumed than the last. They flowed like water from some hidden stream, in twos and then threes. Jackson saw no muscle or bone through their skins, only the gleam of gaslight on exposed legs, breasts, and arms. Chiffon and crinoline wrapped them, silks and laces and brocades, and Jackson knew without a doubt he had never seen anything so extraordinary.

  Sixteen women in total were made to look like carousel animals. While there were a couple horses, one cream and one black, there was also a zebra, a giraffe, an elephant, and a splendid whale. Jackson wondered how the women kept from stepping on its trailing tail, then watched in wonder as the tail rose behind the woman’s back, her skirts also lifting. The uprush of fabric resembled a furious blue-white wave. Jackson stared.

  He also looked for her, the black-eyed girl from the roof, but he did not see her and tried to contain his disappointment. If Bell’s was anything like Macquarie’s, there was more to come and these were not all the entertainers. Jackson sucked in a breath that smelled of smoke and men, and let the wonder of the gaslight on skin and sequin carry him to another place.

  The whale danced off, giving way for beasts Jackson could not name. Glittering wings and writhing coils rioted in tandem as this living carousel rotated across the stage. A snake bowed into the black horse, slithering over the belly and around, until the women were kissing, black lips notched to white. Jackson’s body came alive in ways he wished it would not.

  The entire audience erupted in applause but Jackson remained silent. Silent and aware he was holding tightly to his human form. He wanted to bleed into the thing he truly was, but he thought of those gargoyles and of being swallowed. He thought of missing the black-eyed girl should she appear and so he held fast.