I knew that Vlahutza, had he been a mob one thousand strong, without the route weighing on his soul, would have come at me, with weapons and fury, ready for the rose thorns, the wooden stake, the crossroads where he would leave what remained of me.
“I am not a monster,” I told the Demeter, gripping the helm in the midst of the fog. “I am not a monster.”
But they are.
Petrofsky climbed the Demeter from the dark waters, a whisper full of the sea, scratching at the wood and metal of the hull, crawling like a marine insect, clinging to cracks and rust.
First, I saw his hands, searching. I never thought of a shipwrecked man, someone boarding my ship without permission. Such confusion was impossible at the sight of those split fingers— flesh cleaved to the bone, revealing a fleeting white glow—that hurt the ship in their desperation to cling to it.
Petrofsky was the image that all of us who live upon the sea cherish so as not to be seduced by its liquid beauty, by the yawning abyss over which we sail, which offers its depths as a deadly gift, that green formlessness always calling us.
Bloated face, gray and monstrously swollen hands, black lips open to the incessant violation of the waters, in a scream that no one hears, but that still exists in that rictus.
After climbing on deck, he stood there, motionless, mayhap to allow me to drink deep of all the horror offered in the chalice of his body.
I did not scream.
Later, today, I wonder why I didn’t scream.
Was that dead man in front of me better than the silence that was wearing me down?
Or is it true what they say, that the worst of horror is that there is no horror? After the signs of the storm, the successive disappearances, the rats and the dreams ... what was a dead man on deck but just a dead man?
Mayhap Justine Lafayette one day reached for her full plate, only to behold that what she ate was no longer a sin, flesh torn from the sanity of the world, but simply something overcooked.
Did she miss the screams of the victims, the fresh blood running down her lips?
Was that why she forced Martin Dummolard to seduce those whom they wanted to eat? Did she make him take them to her boarding house, where she watched from the shadows as they slowly stripped, naked body moving over naked body, killing her victim at the last moment of pleasure?
Was playing with them not what brought joy back to their Hunger?
What details did they exchange while chewing their trophies?
Something to cling to, a symbol that said that the meat was something more, that the dead man on deck was something more.
It was remembering the dark mark around Petrofsky’s neck that made me react, which struck the indifference that had saved me from fear.
Not long ago, I yearned for that now-gray flesh, to kiss those now-black lips, to drink the fluids stored inside that now-dead body.
After him, Abranoff climbs aboard, now shouting his despair as he clings to the sails like a huge spider. Olgaren devours the provisions that no longer nourish him, driven by frenetic hunger to chew on lines and cables, seeking the knot that will satiate him. Muresh comes every night to my door, knocking civilly and begging me, in the voice of the one who asks for a small favor, to serve him some meat: mine, so that he might nibble, sipping blood with dainty care. Acketz has begun to gnaw one of his own arms, endlessly.
Mayhap the worst of them all is Joachim, who sits in the middle of the deck and groans, as if death itself pains him.
Pale specters within the storm.
I look at them and feel no fear of them. The fact that they are dead and seek my blood is not enough.
How can I fear them when they come together in the dark, pressing against one other, as if they could—so joined—take shelter from the cold, from the night in which they live? Children wounded by the rain.
I watch them shamble through the ship, taking the objects they treasured once, but finding no meaning in them now. Death a blade that cuts reality in such a way that, from the Other Side, our world is nothing more than a collection of senseless things.
Was I one of these? Mere signs of past events, of memories already devoid of meaning?
Never more.
Is that why they drop them, let them break? They know that death is the domain of the lost.
Not only did they lose their lives, their breath, but the whole world, the sun, all that they were.
They move throughout the Demeter, looking for the limits of their confinement. But it is not this old schooner that imprisons them. Their prison is not the one that sails through the fog.
They are prisoners of their flesh, locked within their simple appetite for blood, within that basic need.
They are Thirst.
They have defeated death, risen from the grave, and now walk of their own accord. Sometimes, their bodies dissolve into myriad sickly points of light, or their feet become a thousand white rats that, in turn, are transformed into fog and then again are mere feet that cannot take them anywhere. They clamber up the mast like insects and then climb down head first, as if they had no weight and their nails and open fingers were sufficient to support them, yet none of those portents signify. Dark Magic means nothing, because they are Thirst.
They never speak to one another. None has tried to convince me that the Other Side is better, that the black waters of death are pleasant.
How, full of hunger, could they speak of the kingdoms of Darkness?
Mayhap they know it not. Not having been invited to the black castle of dissolution, mayhap their supernatural body is the only universe they know.
Mayhap Soul and Flesh have amalgamated into Need.
The priest of Dzerzhinsk always offered us a sermon of hellfire and brimstone: It is necessary to kill the needs of the Flesh to preserve the Soul.
Perdition, he said, is torturing the Soul through the voice of the Flesh.
And if they are One?
What if the eternal Soul that they promise us in the churches can be eternal while also being Flesh?
Is Thirst not a small price for such a Gift?
But how to convince those who suffer that Thirst?
My crew left the sea, in the dark, and came searching for me.
I saw them approach, living fog, broken flesh, yet full of need. I had to shout, take refuge in madness when I thought of their hands tearing my body open, that vile touch caressing me.
Was it better to jump into the waters, lose myself in the sea along with Vlahutza? Who could know?
But I stayed at the helm, watching as they approached with their insect movements, their mouths filled with thick drool that dripped in slow drabs, anticipating the taste of my flesh.
The only thing I could do, the last thing, was to beg their forgiveness for having embarked on such a cursed journey.
Who has not heard of ships sailing with no one on board? Of steaming meals on tables, cards dealt as though naught had interrupted the game?
What is more terrible: knowing about the disappearance or having almost experienced it?
The sea sometimes needs a sacrifice: the mystery of what happened at the last moment.
Old ships withstand unexpected storms and sturdy boats have been shipwrecked under the sun upon a calm sea.
Is that not the wherefore of our little superstitions: the saliva we spit on the wheel and at the dock, begging them to meet again; the skein Olgaren used to bind the winds; the rosary Vlahutza clutched, commemorating the mysteries; the mujik prayers that I have not forgotten; not killing albatrosses; not spilling impure blood overboard; making figures with salt?
I should have taken port when the albino rats appeared, forced Melih to stay on board and confirm there was no danger in the Demeter. We should have fled from the endless disappearances.
This is the payment for my indecision: my men rising from
their watery grave, coming for me.
The Dark Miracle.
The Secret.
They came out to plunge me into the mystery, so that only the logbook and nothingness might speak of us.
“Yes,” I told them, offering myself to them. Is that not what I always desired: to give in to their need, to please their senses, to give peace to their bodies? “Yes.”
I had in my hands the rosary that the Mate had dropped at the last moment, as if God were not necessary when surrendering oneself to the oblivion of the sea. They looked upon it as if it were a weapon: the last barrier that stopped them.
This? A dead man on a cross?
The symbol of Soul and Flesh separated. The sign of fear wielded by the priest of Dzerzhinsk, the man who planted a stake in Mikhail’s body.
I dropped the beads, let them smash against the ground at my feet.
I would not stop them.
I felt it just that they come for me. An eye for an eye.
My death for theirs.
Blood for blood.
Silver voices, thrumming with a thousand unknown tones, filling each word with the shadow of sounds beyond the human ear.
blood
There was no need for them to say more.
I thought of those pathetic children who have had enough of begging in the ports, so they hide aboard ships, believing that to travel in a hold full of rank cargo is a better destiny.
In exchange for some hypothetical apprenticeship, they cannot offer a strength they do not possess, so they typically give sailors the only thing they can, what they have sold since they discovered they can satisfy a specific hunger.
White and wiry flesh, the caresses of a mouth that has learned that there is nothing more ignominious than hunger.
Cabin boys.
How many times did I fantasize about taking one of them and covering his skin with my lips, making a deal that would give me free use of his flesh?
I never did so because such poor creatures cannot consent. They have no will. They lend themselves to pleasure without pleasure, focused on nonsense while one searches in vain within them for something other than sphincters that tighten mechanically.
One immediately understands that they are not present in that moment, that they have left their body at the mercy of another’s need, but that they are safe—or perhaps merely indifferent—elsewhere.
In Bulgaria, they speak of the obour, which leaves the grave transformed into a being without bones, of spongy, immaterial flesh, which—sometimes—does not produce shadows because its essence is absent.
When these children lent themselves to the incessant blow of the tides of sex, it little mattered whether they were alive or had become those insomniac specters, scouring the forests in search of what they have lost.
My crew were not obours.
I was.
Flesh without will at its disposal.
When we have lost everything, is that not the last thing we possess? Skin and memory.
It mattered not.
They came to me dragging their naked need, stripped of all human traits, dogs looking for fallen scraps.
I knew, then, the terrible price of Flesh and Soul made One.
Eternal Flesh would be a Paradise for a human being.
Yet, what if to reach that place, one must cease being human?
They came to me transformed into monsters. Into Justines. She was human, but not her appetites.
Thirst, I told myself. They are Thirst.
To that they have been reduced. That is their essence, empty of everything.
Once the hunger was satisfied, with the warm food inside them ... what would they do? Start exploring their new skills, congratulate themselves for having escaped death, stroke their gray flesh?
They could speak of Immortality, of the enormous cycles of time they will witness, of the glacial turning of constellations, of the immobile earth moving through the millennia. Of the Eternal and the beauty of the world beyond the sunlight.
Mayhap they would discover secret senses, new pleasures, the satisfaction of being— incessantly.
Until the Thirst returned.
In the ports of Africa, teeming with the absurdly vital heat of greenhouses, where everything can grow and anything born under the sun seems possible, they sell Ghanaian monsters: deformed creatures with huge teeth so large that, if they should ever clamp their jaws shut, those fangs would pass through their palates to their brains.
They are nothing more than large cane rats fed from birth with liquids, their mouths tied so they can never gnaw and thus file down the ceaseless growth of their teeth.
Ghanaian monsters should die when abandoned to their own fate, but some, the valuable ones, the ones they offer in braided cages, use their disproportionate fangs to rip open other rats and drink their blood, shivering with hunger.
They do not mate.
From the moment their teeth touch another skin to tear it open, there is no other pleasure than to rip, shred the flesh to feed.
That is their true deformity.
Their fangs can break easily, but even without them, they are unable to return to what they never were. They would die in a barn full of grain.
Their paradise: a sea of blood that feeds them endlessly.
My crew, the wraiths that come after my blood with their supernatural form, have been reduced to that: They are Ghanaian monsters with the terrible curse of thought.
“We are sybarites,” they might say to one another, afterwards. “Ours is the eternal, immortal pleasure.”
But they are nothing more than tortured rats.
And I was their food.
They had to eat of me, break the fragile barrier of my skin and dive into my blood, bathe their hungry faces. Finish in that instant all I ever was.
That would have redeemed me.
But they did not kill me.
He—That Thing!—prevented it.
The Cruelty That Warps. The Maker of Monsters.
“He is mine,” he said, with limitless arrogance.
Then I saw it … him … in the dark. God forgive me, but Vlahutza was right to jump overboard. It is better to die like a man. To die like a sailor in blue water, no man can object.
My men turned away, abjectly, like dogs at the voice of a murderous Master.
The tall and thin man.
He didn’t even bother to approach; far from the helm, looking out at the sea, he growled his order without taking his eyes off the night that made him a vague shadow.
I could feel the power emanating from him, the force contained in each of his movements.
Once, I went to see the Trans-Siberian, the train that—in the long run—is going to kill off the schooners and the captains like me, with its safe rail route crossing a seemingly infinite Russia, bringing passengers and cargo to important ports by land instead of over the formless sea.
Its solid steel, thrumming that thin black skin, all the cars contaminated by the vibrating fire of its locomotive.
I imagined what it would be like to not get out of its way, to stand on the tracks, watching it approach.
That man, that thing, had the same strength and also the cruelty of men, as if the Trans-Siberian could jump its tracks at will to snatch up all who thought themselves safe from its fury.
“I am not yours!” I shouted. “I belong to no one!”
And he laughed, softly, without taking his eyes from the black horizon.
“You belong to Mikhail,” he said, “and to your small need for pleasure, Captain. You belong to the sin you committed against that man. To the fact that you seduced when he could not rightly choose. You went to him, in the dark, erect, when he could not say no to your touch. You went and he accepted, true. And continued beyond your flesh and in the end, he was crushed. You for
ced him to eat a forbidden fruit and the reward was a stake that forever violates a dead body, with no ceasing, no peace. Nay, you are not mine. You do not deserve to be. Captain, you are your own and you serve a very small master.”
“How ...?”
“How do I know it all? You told me yourself, in your dreams. You gave me the secrets of your reckoning, of this ship’s course, in exchange for a little pleasure. You made a pact with me. The destination of the boat in exchange for the fulfillment of your middling needs. Don’t look at me with disgust, little man. You are like me.”
He said no more, but continued savoring his voyage, looking out upon a world turned into night, without land, or any human light, to gainsay his dominion.
I should hit him, face him somehow. Channel my fury into weapons, let the steel live its weak tiger dream, let gunpowder explode in my hands as I seek to erase his sneering face.
Vlahutza struck that immaterial flesh in vain.
And he knew that I was unable to hurt him. What weapon had I at my disposal?
The crew returned to the water when a gray line appeared on the horizon: the dawn.
The man left his lookout and walked toward the hold, serenely, as if heading to a luxurious cabin.
Why there?
Who would deny him any of the empty cabins, my own bare bed? Yet, he went by his own will down into that rancid hole.
To the boxes we kept there.
I guessed that he rested inside them, that he could only sleep within that oozing earth, among those blind worms brought from his realm, guarded by albino rats.
He went there, sliding, indifferent to the waves and the constant movement of the Demeter. Not as a man of land, not as a man of sea. Something else, different. From kingdoms outside the human experience.
Smiling.
I had worked on enough passenger ships to know that gesture.
I had seen it on the faces of travelers who knew that exotic pleasures awaited them on the other side of the water, unknown but ready to be relished. Only the voyage separated them from new delicacies, from sweet experiences upon their arrival, and therefore the crossing was a pleasure: a long and placid savoring of assured treats.
The Route of Ice and Salt Page 9
