The Kraken Sea

by E. Catherine Tobler

  “When the mister died, the ma’am was left all things.” Foster’s voice drifted over his shoulder in a fading poof of fogged breath. “Mister collected creatures from his journeys.” Foster lifted the lantern and light shot down the tunnel ahead of them.

  Jackson was reminded of the sideshow tents, of how something strange had been around every corner. This place was not so different, with the exception that he and the others were generally free to go where they would. The shadows had been boxed up, likely with good cause. Had the sideshow man told himself the same thing when it came to the snake woman in the cage? Jackson didn’t like that idea right then, even if he understood it.

  What Foster took him to was not a cage. The tunnel opened into a low ceilinged stone room with a broad pool of water spreading out from the lip of the floor. Jackson would have called it a swimming pool, but this was not so formal. The room had not been built so much as carved out, allowing the sea to flood it.

  “The ocean?” Jackson made to step forward, but Foster held him back. Jackson saw the line scratched on the stone floor.

  “Stay behind here,” Foster said. He set the lantern on a metal table then reached for the nearby box. It was much like the metal trunk from the docks. Foster crossed the line on the floor and set the box at the pool’s edge. He opened the lid and leapt back behind the line.

  “Doesn’t seem like much protection,” Jackson said. “This line.” He toed it. Nothing happened.

  Foster didn’t say anything. Jackson lifted his gaze to the box just as black vapor began to spill from it. It was strange how it happened; it didn’t spill from the open lid, but leaked the same way the trunk in the sitting room had, from the bottom.

  The color of the water in the pool began to change. At first Jackson thought it was taking on the black of the shadows, ink bleeding into the sea, but it quickly became something else, a large and shadowed form rising as if summoned. Two thick, black tentacles lined with suckers burst from the pool and landed on the edge, writhing no farther than the line marked in the stone. The tentacles pressed into the stone floor, to lift a massive body from the sea. This body was possessed of only one thing, a fang-rimmed mouth disinclined to hesitate before attacking the metal box. It had one demand: feed me.

  It wasn’t silent this meal. The metal trunk bent and crumpled as the beast chewed the shadows from it, the sound of rending metal causing Jackson to cover his ears even if he couldn’t look away. When it wasn’t tearing metal, it was screaming. Screaming shadows, screaming from a place Jackson did not want to envision. Water overflowed the pool, flooding the room, over Jackson’s shoes and back under the metal desks and cabinets, but when at last the beast withdrew, so did the water, lapping back at the stone edge once more.

  “Mister got that in Greenland,” Foster said. “Thinks those shadows are its teatime.” Foster gave Jackson a thin smile and Jackson shuddered. He thought of the sister and the table and the look in Cressida’s eye.

  “Was it a kraken?”

  “The mister said so. You raise a thing in captivity, it grow smaller. You let a thing swim free … It fills up all the spaces it can.”

  For the first time, Jackson became keenly aware of the walls around them. Not only in the room, but Macquarie’s as a whole. The foundling hospital had come to feel this way, too. It was a kind of captivity, a restriction. An inability to swim free.

  §

  Every Sunday, Cressida hosted dinner for her family and employees. Not everyone came; many of those who worked for her had families of their own and preferred spending time with them. Jackson, however, wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else, because the dinners became a slow pageant he loved to watch unfold.

  Perhaps the building had once been a hotel, the formal dining room too large for the one table Cressida set. Every Sunday saw every chair filled. Cressida occupied the head of the table and while the chair at the foot of the table appeared empty, everyone said Mister Macquarie himself sat there, in spirit if not flesh. Water was always poured for him and sometimes whiskey. Some nights, a full plate of food was served. Some nights, it was said people noticed the level in the water glass nearby drop more than once, as if he drank from the world beyond.

  Jackson never noticed anything in that regard, sitting directly to Cressida’s left hand. The spot at the foot of the table was distant enough he couldn’t tell what went on down there. Many times after a meal, if there was a smudge on a clean glass or the blue napkin was disturbed, Jackson never took it for the doings of a specter.

  But tonight, Jackson wondered, because he watched the translucent dancers who flanked the chair and they laughed over things he could not hear. Small birds, not chickens or ducks, had been roasted with their heads left on. A fan of their strange magenta feathers had been saved to decorate their otherwise bald scalps.

  Cressida pulled long strips of skin and flesh free to nibble as she would. Jackson found himself partial to the soda he got on these nights and the fried cow heels. He always found himself amazed at the quantity of food spread over the table and that very little remained when all was said and done.

  “You honestly think the mister is down there?” Jackson asked Cressida around a bite of cow heel.

  On reflection, it was the wrong thing to ask her. He might have asked Foster later when they were alone, or even one of the dancers. But to ask this question of the mister’s widow was something different. Jackson’s gaze slid from the empty chair to Cressida, who paused with a bite of bird between her lips. He had never seen such an expression on her face before. Not even the look she had given him at the sight of him hugging Sister Jerome Grace could compare.

  Cressida bit the wing in half, returning the rest to her plate. Her hand slid into her lap where she clutched her napkin. When her hand came back to the tabletop, her fingers teased the edge of her unused knife. The silver edge reflected a line of light onto her fingers.

  “You think I give a good god damn what anyone else thinks about the chair?”

  Jackson set his half eaten cow heel down and took a quick swig of soda before wiping his hands clean. “That … wasn’t what I asked or even meant, because I know you don’t. Don’t care. About — ”

  Her hand moved from the edge of the knife to cover Jackson’s own hand. He went silent, half surprised the knife wasn’t buried in his hand. Cressida smiled soft and her fingers stroked over the back of his hand in a slow rhythm.

  Her voice was just as soft. “There are certain things I do care about in this household, little Jackson. I care about tradition and respect. I care about maintaining things as they are — respecting the way things are. One doesn’t cross certain lines in this house, but you know this. You know this and yet …”

  Her hand slid from his, to delve under the tent of her blue napkin. The next thing Jackson knew, two paper lions rested on the table between them. Hand-colored paper. Ivory ribbons. They smelled vaguely of mereling tank water. Jackson wanted to reach for them, wanted them back because they were not hers

  Oh they were not hers

  and his mind spun at how she had gotten them at all. He remembered his hasty undressing, kicking damp trousers into his hamper to get them off, not thinking about Mae’s paper lions. Hadn’t remembered to take them out, smooth them flat, and keep them where they would not be found.

  “You do cross lines, little Jackson,” Cressida said. She leaned back in her chair, more throne than simple chair. She sat a queen and Jackson a lowly petitioner, begging for something he needed to live.

  “You didn’t say not to explore.”

  Cressida’s head inclined in silent agreement. “I did not, but I am certain Foster explained territory to you and how our business does not expand northward. North presently belongs to the Bells and until I can change that, I respect those lines.”

  She made the lines sound like little more than a nuisance, beneath even her notice,. Imaginary lines, like the lines he had drawn in the foundling hospital, but there even so.

  “
What did she tell you?”

  “Tell me?” Jackson’s hands itched to claim the lions; he held his napkin so he would not.

  Cressida smiled. “I have given you a home, Jackson. You sit at my table and partake of my food.” She reached for both fork and knife. She stabbed the bird’s breast with the knife and began to shred the meat with the fork. The silver tines were merciless, turning the meat from a beautiful pale crescent into a ragged, frayed mess.

  “She didn’t tell me anything.” He chose his words carefully, certain Cressida would know he was treading a fine line as were they both in this conversation. It was true, in a way, that Mae hadn’t told him anything. “Mostly, she wanted to know what I am. Probably so she can … so they can …”

  “Defend against you,” Cressida finished for him. She set her silverware down and a breath went out of her. “They have done such before.”

  Her voice sounded resigned now and Jackson sagged into his chair, thinking he had avoided one wound, but might yet sustain another.

  “Did she try to tempt you into seeing her show?” Cressida touched the paper lions, a low rustle in the murmur of conversations around them.

  “I went to a show, ma’am.” On that point, it was best to be clear. Anyone could have attended the show, seen him there.

  He thought this would upset Cressida, but the wound was in her smile, and the way she leaned back in her chair once more, as if everything had just fallen into her lap. “Oh, little Jackson. Maybe you are here for reasons even I don’t fully understand yet. An inside line, straight through that young girl’s …” She paused, as if sorting words on her tongue. “… heart.”

  §

  Jackson was encouraged to return to Bell’s. At the discovery that his admission costs had gone up, he thought about telling Cressida, but decided against it. He knew as he stepped back into the theater and made his way to his usual place, he was willing to pay whatever cost to see Mae and her lions.

  Cressida wanted information, she wanted him inside the enemy’s territory, and would surely give him the money to get there, but it didn’t sit right with him. He decided he would go because it suited his own needs, not because it suited Cressida’s. He would tell her something — the number of people, the condition of the Bells — but she didn’t need to know why he actually came. She already did, part of him knew. He told that part to shut it.

  Tonight, the carousel women were dressed as mice and crows. The mice had soft gray coats, with large, colored ribbons tied around their necks. These ribbons echoed those drawn on the paper lions Mae had given Jackson; Cressida had not returned them and he had no doubt she knew what their loss would do to him. The lions were his.

  Most of the crows wore long gowns of glossy black feathers; some of the feathers came loose as the women moved, to drift into the orchestra pit, onto tables. Others among the crows wore shorter skirts, lean legs turned violet under the drenching gaslights. Jackson sank into his usual chair and ordered a Coca-Cola when one of the crow servers sidled up to him.

  The crows chased the mice, but sometimes the mice turned the tables and chased the crows. Some of the birds flew to escape into the rafters, and some over the audience itself. They were acrobats all, graceful and flying, and Jackson felt his want like a hard ball of sunlight in his gut. He wanted to fly, he wanted to possess the fliers, he wanted too much.

  When Mae strode onto the stage, he wasn’t prepared for it. Every show was different, he knew this from attending here and also Macquarie’s, but this was something he had not seen before.

  Mae wore a gown of starlight and pearls woven into white silk. It didn’t seem like something a lion tamer would wear, no sheath of protective leather beneath the gown. There was only skin.

  At her arrival, the mice vanished into the shadows and most of the crows went too. Only one remained. This crow, Mae stalked, without her whip until one of her lions padded onto stage with the curl of leather held in its mouth. Mae took the whip and the lion moved opposite her mistress, Mae approaching the crowgirl from another angle.

  The crowgirl was careful with both Mae and the lion, allowing neither to get very close. Twice she escaped them by pushing herself into the air with her long black wings. As the lights flickered, Jackson could not pick out the wires that helped her fly, but soon didn’t care. The entire scene shifted.

  After the crow’s second flight, the lion leapt forward with a growl and tackled the crow to the stage. There was no mistaking the scream from the crow, nor the snap of a bone inside that wing. Jackson’s eyes widened, but he wasn’t surprised when Mae flicked her whip to call the lion back. The lion stalked to her, pacing a line behind Mae, eyes on the wounded crow. Every line in the lion’s body said it wanted to pounce, but it respected Mae’s control.

  Her control did not waver. The crow slid away when Mae approached. Mae’s dress began to melt away as she went, skirts floating soundless to the floor, bodice falling apart pearl by pearl. The pearls dropped to the stage but where they went from there, Jackson could never have said. He was captivated by Mae and the ivory skin revealed bit by bit, even though she never came wholly naked. Shimmering starlight clung to every curve, galaxies and nebulae obscuring breasts and belly, hovering in a hazy skirt around her upper thighs.

  The whip cracked as it curled around the crow’s neck so Mae could haul her closer. Jackson, having experienced this on the roof, was transfixed. Mae made a silent gesture and the lioness leapt.

  It was astonishing, the amount of blood spilled to the stage. Jackson wondered if it was wine or crushed fruit. At this distance he could not tell, could not smell it, but the audience reacted as if it were real. They stared in silence as the lioness ripped into the crow, as feathers exploded into the air and drifted back down. There would be vents in the stage, Jackson thought, to drain the mess away, a trapdoor a dancer could slide through to make it look as though only a husk of feathers remained.

  When this became the case, the wings motionless, the lioness having gorged herself, Mae rose. Blood flecked her, starlight gone crimson. She coiled her whip, slid it into the lion’s mouth for carrying, and both strode from the stage, as silent as they had come. Only then did the audience erupt in shrieks.

  Jackson left his chair in the madness. Other dancers moved to clear the stage for the next act and the audience continued to holler in appreciation. He found his way to the narrow door behind a fall of curtain. He slipped into the darkness of backstage, where he had seen others go. No one paid him a lick of attention.

  Backstage dropped into a half staircase, flanked by curving banisters and red-gelled lights so one wouldn’t trip in the dark. Jackson was drawn to the low moan from beneath the stage. He followed the stairs to the doors nestled in their side, leading to the understage.

  Mae crouched beside a bloody body. It was the crow from the stage; the blood was real, the body savaged by the lion, but the person, a male dancer, had not yet passed. On his other side, another woman crouched. She was older than Mae, brown-skinned, and held in her hands a sharp knife. She slid one hand into the ruin of the man’s belly and came up with looked like entrails.

  No. They were finer. Threads.

  A jolt rolled through Jackson. His mind yanked him to the train yard with Sister Jerome Grace, her palm split open.

  Mae’s hands slid up the bloody threads as if feeling for something. A pulse, a knot. When she stopped, she looked at the other woman and nodded. The chest of the man between them rose and fell with ragged breath; the finery worn on stage was strewn around them, trampled, bloody.

  The woman with Mae lifted her knife and drew it above Mae’s hands. This cutting was not silent; the man did not move so much as exhaled his last breath ever. Beyond that low breath, the threads crackled like dry twigs as the blade went through them.

  Every hair on Jackson’s body stood upright. The air warmed, like a hand against his cheek, and then was gone. The man on the floor did not move, the threads dead in the woman’s hand. She drew her blade away and i
t sank into her hand the way Sister Jerome Grace’s threads had.

  Only then did Mae turn to pin him with her black stare. Jackson stared back.

  Mae crossed his way. She bypassed him, to close the doors behind him. They had no lock, but Jackson could hear the ongoing show above them and had no doubt they would hear anyone before they arrived. Chances were, the following act wouldn’t even employ the trap doors, because surely they knew about Mae. Knew what she was.

  “You’re fates.” He spat the words, staring at Mae as she came back around him. His eyes darted to the other woman, tried to see the knife within her skin, but couldn’t. “You’re the other two.” There was a relief in this realization, but his body also vibrated with unease. Had they all been here before? Or was the sister the only one who could draw a loop back around.

  No — she said …

  “I spun your thread,” Jackson whispered, “and my sister could not bear to cut it … you have come to its end many times … Oh.”

  He wasn’t sure where one thing ended and the next started. The room ceased to exist; he was moving before he realized it, changing forms, arms reaching for the woman who stood beyond Mae.

  Everything was confusion. The whip snapped against his neck in a tightening noose, but he didn’t stop. With a bellow, he charged the other woman and she let him catch her. He became very aware of this, that she let him, that she could have turned to threads and poured through his fingers, through the floor; could have cut this juncture, but something held her … Something. Someone.

  Mae.

  This knowledge was like a rifle shot within the small room, puzzle pieces snapping into place. If this woman cut, and Sister Jerome Grace spun, it could only mean Mae determined how long a thread would be. How long a thing continued, or didn’t.

  He pushed the nameless one against the unfinished concrete wall. Mae shouldered into him from behind, a small warm mass that made him go motionless, but he did not surrender his hold on the woman before him.

  She was like no one he had seen before, brown and round, black hair spiraling down her bare shoulders. She wore a costume of the theater, but was clearly no performer. Her eyes were not brown or black, but maybe sepia. When the light shifted, they were gold and amber, yellow like a watchful cat before they settled back to shadows.