The Kraken Sea

by E. Catherine Tobler

  Something awful lingered in her eyes, something else he recognized. That look of being found strange, of being both loved and hated for it, but mostly always hated. She slithered to the cage bars and wrapped her hands around the metal. She said nothing, but her misery was clear. Her eyes were shadowed now, but Jackson saw them clear as day. Clear as this entire tent, filled with things like him.

  He had worked so long and hard to learn the ways of holding himself together. Some days were worse than others. Some days, the truth of him wanted to spill everywhere like flooding water. Other days he found it easy to assume this false shape to pass unseen. But in this warm tent, he began to spill. This was why they gave him up, he had told himself over and over as he tried to find sleep. This was why his parents tucked him into a wood box and left him on the hospital’s back stoop. This was what hid inside of him, a creature that others would cage.

  “Boy?”

  The man and his mustache — Jackson could smell him now, oil amid the musk of the woman. But it was already too late; Jackson’s hands were no longer hands. They had vanished into the cuffs of the coat he wore, wriggling in a thousand directions as crimson scale swallowed his ordinary skin. His tight-laced shoes burst open, ruined as leg-thick coils identical to the woman’s slithered out. His trouser seams split to the knee and he made a great bellowing sound, like none he had before. His rage and fear poured out, careless, haphazard. The man and his mustache toppled backward, the woman in the cage rattling the door in a plea.

  The door was little obstacle. Jackson flung one arm, enveloped two bars, and pulled. He threw the door, taking pleasure in the way it ripped through tent canvas and displays alike. He gave no thought to the others inside in the tent — was only vaguely aware of the distant shrieks as his attention rested on the man who had imprisoned Jackson’s own kind.

  Much as his appendages had coiled around the bars, they now closed around the hawker’s throat. There was a burble, the sound before breath bleeds entirely away. Jackson eased his hold only slightly, because he wouldn’t finish with this man so quickly. He wanted to see the fear in the man’s eyes before he swallowed him. The hawker’s head shook, eyes blown wide and terrified, Jackson’s own true image reflected within. If Jackson had a proper mouth, he might have smiled, but his mouth was in no way proper. This gaping maw could only expand.

  There was no scream, only a muffled groan Jackson swallowed. Screams came from others stampeding from the tent, from more tangled in the canvas. The scent of rotten liquids began to rise, jars and tanks broken, contents spilled. Old flesh and new began to dissolve in the air as Jackson came back to himself, as he began to dwindle from monster back to boy.

  It was there he saw her first: the girl who had fainted and needed water. The tent had collapsed, allowing him to see the log where she had been taken. Her chin was no longer bent to her chest and her eyes —

  Her eyes were black and on him. She did not look away.

  §

  Sister Jerome Grace found Jackson in the train yard, rocking back and forth in the late afternoon sun, clothes in tatters. His shoes were missing, feet whipping viper coils, and when she wasn’t surprised, he wasn’t surprised. They had been here before. She had asked him not to come back to this place, but this place was home, torn and imperfect, but his own no matter where else he might go.

  “Breathe.”

  Jackson breathed, their positions reversed from what they had been in the wheel’s windowed car. She was telling him, he knew, to go with the world and not against it, to ease the sickness wanting to swallow him. It was harder now.

  It would happen more regularly with the onset of adulthood, the priests had speculated. He shouldn’t be kept under a holy roof, they had often said. But crosses did not burn him nor did prayers send him running, so he was kept, he was believed in, he was given a place he was now being taken from. Taken and placed in a world he did not — could not — understand, and anger rushed up his spine, a flood of blood and rage.

  “Jac —”

  He seemed to step outside himself, watching as one thick arm lifted. It pushed Sister Jerome Grace back, flinging her to the ground like trash. The blackness, when it swallowed him, did not entirely carry him away, because he saw everything, felt everything. There was no escaping what had a hold of him. Jackson ran, deeper into the tangle of tracks and trains, but the sister’s voice held him as she followed, and bid him come back.

  “Tell me what I am!” Jackson’s words were a ragged bellow from an imperfect mouth that wanted only to howl. He stayed a train car length ahead of her, not letting her catch him. The coils of his lower body whispered over the stones, the railroad ties, the steel tracks as he passed between parked trains. He had no control, as though everything he had learned within the foundling hospital’s walls had been ripped away. This clear sky was too large, his own kind caged beneath it.

  She said what they always said when he asked. “We don’t know. Jackson —”

  He moved like water, at the sister’s side in an instant. One not-hand wrapped around her throat when before he had never dared touch her beyond her hands or sleeved arms. Beneath the fabric closing her away from the world, he could feel the hammer of her heart. Part of him wanted to draw back and not invade her space, but he stayed as he was. He pressed her into the side of the train car, feeling his body stretch taller, darker, a spreading stain.

  “You have some idea.” His voice was close to splintering and he drew a breath, forced some measure of stillness into himself. “Don’t tell me what they think. Those men of God.” He spat and closed his not-hand more tightly around her throat. “Tell me what you think. You, who have known me all these years. You, who have never told me the name your parents gave you.”

  Warmth flooded into Sister Jerome Grace’s cheeks; Jackson could feel it sluice from her skin and he bit his cheek, forcing himself to give her time to answer. She did not look at him.

  “We do not speak of these things,” she said.

  He expected her to whisper, to flounder, but that was gone from her. She did not try to wrest herself from his hold, only lifted her hand, to reveal her palm. Her other hand lifted her belt, adorned with the scapulars she wore, her rosary, and a small pair of silver scissors. It was the scissors she untangled, lifting their sharpened point to her exposed palm. She slashed down and into the lined skin before Jackson could think of stopping her.

  He expected blood and for her to cry out. He heard only the rumble of an approaching train and there was no blood. The flesh of Sister Jerome Grace’s palm split to reveal what looked like a thousand writhing snakes, but as they spilled out, he saw they were threads. They were colorless, yet glowed in the afternoon light. Each looked identical to the others, he could tell no difference between. They whispered through her fingers, never falling to the ground, but twining around fingers and wrists, and back into the opened flesh.

  “You have read your mythology,” the sister said, voice low, but he could hear her above the rumble of the train as it passed two tracks over.

  One thread lifted from the mass, sliding around Jackson’s own wrist and it never occurred to him to fear it because it was like his own scaled skin. He knew it for his own. His thread, inside the sister’s palm.

  “I know what you are. I made you what you are, before the world was as it is. Before humanity was in ruin.”

  As the thread tightened, Jackson saw a landscape unfold in his mind. Long rolling grasses spread under a sky too blue to look at long. In the far distance, white marble jutted against the sky, and he could smell a fire, a sacrifice. He moved through the field not as a man might but as a god would. He was snake and man both, perfectly fused.

  “I spun your thread,” she said, “and my sister could not bear to cut it — you have come to its end many times, but she splices it, ties it to another, and back you come.”

  “We have been here before?” His gaze stayed on her. He sensed the metal of the trains weighing on them both, keeping them anchored.
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  Sister Jerome Grace nodded only once. “Yes and no.” Her eyes met his at long last, grave and nearly gray in the shadow of him. “You must go to San Francisco and be what you will.”

  Jackson tightened his hold on her neck, pushing her into the train car door. She did not protest — if they had been here before, she knew he would not hurt her. He knew this too, but doubted the courtesy could extend beyond this occasion. He stared, seeing in her eyes another figure, something he couldn’t understand. A figure in a corner, a figure who said nothing, but only stared back.

  “You spin threads and your sister cuts.” One curling tentacle of a finger slid up her cheek and she did not blink, only watched him long and calm. He stroked the edge of her veil, the line of her temple. “There is a third.” Three was holy — three was sacred. There were three Fates, this he knew as well as he knew anything he had ever read in a book.

  “Yes.”

  Jackson drew into the false skin he showed to the world. Every strange part of him withered, became normal. He was nothing more than an ordinary boy when he got hold of himself, trousers tattered, but it was feet peeking out at him, ten normal toes grimed with the muck of the train yard.

  The sister let her scissors drop into the folds of her black skirts and her hand knit itself back together, all the threads swallowed up into her as the seam closed without flaw. He wondered if spools would spill out should she be split down her middle. If under her veil it wasn’t hair at all, but braided coils of colored thread, and he ached to know. How easy it would be, he thought, to pull that fabric loose.

  Instead, he drew his chilled hands into the over-sized sleeves of his coat, and only followed her when she led the way back to the train. She ensured no one saw him as he made his way to the sleeping compartment, to find clothes whole and untorn.

  §

  Jackson’s suitcase belonged to someone else before he owned it. Probably another orphan, the sister had told him, though even she claimed not to know. There was a small square of flecked gold near the handle, engraved to read M. Markey. Jackson tried to picture this person, based on the hard sided case, but came up empty. He wasn’t good at picturing people, but as he folded his ruined trousers into the case, he pictured the young woman he had seen at the striped tent. The young woman who watched him as the sideshow fell around them.

  If she hadn’t swooned inside the tent, why the show for her friends? Had they been her friends at all — because those two were nowhere to be seen in the ruin. Friends, as Jackson understood, usually stayed.

  Jackson slid his belt into its loops around his waist, to tighten the untorn, but too-large trousers. He couldn’t explain the three young women at all and stopped trying as the train’s whistle blew. It would be dinner soon and then time to try to find sleep for a brief escape from wanting to be the other thing he was. Though he managed to hold his own cry at the sound of the whistle this time, it echoed within him. The rumble of the wheels along the track was like the flow of his blood, ceaseless and circular, running toward a horizon he could not see.

  A watery horizon if the sisters were right. They said there would be water in San Francisco, but he had seen lakes before. Just big puddles, he thought, but was proved rather wrong when at last they reached the city. It was an ocean, like the Atlantic licking New York, but this Sister Mary Luke said, was the Pacific. Pacific meant calm, but Jackson didn’t feel calm at the sight of it. He didn’t feel anything for the water — it was the train he didn’t want to leave.

  He held tight to his suitcase and lingered in the doorway as others flowed toward the platform where the sisters lined them up, brushing coats into more orderly pleats. They made sure name tags were properly turned and cheeks not smudged. The sister’s hand tightened briefly over his before she moved toward the platform. The train echoed empty when she went, so he dropped from the step, glancing at the train before he moved further. She bellowed steam from top and bottom, wreathing herself anew.

  Priests stood on the platform and while the sisters and other children walked toward these men with eager expressions and confidence, Jackson was slower. Once accounted for, the priests and sisters shooed everyone into the depot, onto long, creaking benches. Jackson counted the panes of leaded glass in the windows while the other children were called and taken into a room. The children never emerged from the room, were only swallowed up one by one, two by two.

  “Jackson.”

  Sister Jerome Grace stood outside the room and he forced himself to move toward her, aware of how tight his shoes pressed, how loose his coat. Everything was backwards but for the smooth, sweat-slick handle of his suitcase. It was warmer inside the small office when the door closed behind them. Jackson immediately looked for another door, breathing only when he found it on the opposite wall. Between him and the door sat a woman unlike any he had seen.

  Her face looked like it had once been struck with great force, mouth and nose a little flatter than they should be. Her eyes — green like the velveteen of the train seats, like Sister Jerome Grace’s eyes — were wide, perhaps from surprise carried through the years from that strike. Honey-colored hair was braided into a near beehive atop her head, laced into tight order.

  Her head tilted, rouged cheek brushing the shoulder of her black fur coat. A fox’s head tucked against the side of her neck, eyes glittering like violet stones. Her skirts were black, but striped with gray, and she smelled like Sunday morning breakfast at the foundling hospital, pancakes after Mass. Jackson suspected these cakes only tasted so good because they weren’t allowed to eat before services.

  “Hello, Jackson.”

  In her voice, Jackson heard a dozen low train whistles. It was that sound rumbling through him again, vibrating his bones until he expected them to shake out of his skin. He glanced down to be sure they hadn’t, to be sure his wrists were covered and his hands were hands. He exhaled hard when he found it was so.

  “Ma’am,” he said and the sister’s hand slid over his shoulder. Why had a woman like her called for a boy like him?

  The woman laughed and it was the sound of falling down a rabbit hole and ending up someplace you never expected and didn’t entirely understand.

  “Don’t need to ma’am me, but can call me Cressida. Some call me the Widow, some call me something else entirely, but you … Cressida.”

  Despite the wonder of Cressida, there was another in the room who commanded Jackson’s attention, who had commanded it long before he looked upon any other. He looked to Sister Jerome Grace, who sat beside the priest who ensured the paperwork was in order, that Cressida actually wanted him of all the orphans. Why that might be, Jackson didn’t care, because he realized he was to part ways with the sister.

  The breath went out of him as he thought of the threads within her palm and the color of her eyes in the shade of the train car. There were three, she had said. Was Cressida one? Was this why she asked for him? He longed to ask the sister, even opened his mouth, but she shook her head — to say no, or to forestall such questions, he didn’t know. Jackson swallowed the query. He clasped his hands together and tried not to leak out of his skin. He wanted so badly to fall apart, but he held to the words the sister had spoken before: he had to come to San Francisco.

  Had they been in this room before? He wanted to ask the sister, but pressed tongue to teeth and held every part of himself that wanted to spill out in check.

  And then they were gone — there were papers, a flurry of signatures and thank yous, and they were gone and Jackson wasn’t sure who was more relived when they went, Cressida or the priests who handed him over. He and Cressida walked into the bright afternoon, into a city Jackson could not fathom, Cressida’s hand on his shoulder and not the sister’s. When he looked back, there was only a closed door.

  §

  Jackson wouldn’t let Cressida take his suitcase. She moved toward him and he took a step away, keeping a tight grip on the handle as they walked into the city street. Cressida nodded as he dropped a few paces behind
her. The fur coat she wore featured a tail spilling from her shoulder; it swayed with every step she took.

  She led him to a wheeled vehicle with a metal wagon-like body lacking a hitch for a horse. He had never seen such a thing, nor had he seen the kind of man who stood nearby. Chinese often populated the penny dreadfuls he read, but Jackson had never thought to see one. The man was slight, wrapped in a loose-fitting white tunic that hid his hands and long pants falling over his feet. Gray hair was pulled into a knot at the top of his head and dark eyes narrowed on Jackson as they approached. His mouth lifted in a vague smile though, and he bowed from the waist. He said nothing, only angled his attention to Cressida, offering her a hand up to the seat.

  There was not much space in the vehicle, not when the other man settled next to Cressida. Jackson clambered behind her, sitting on his suitcase as the vehicle rumbled to life.

  “The people,” Cressida said, “they will look as we go.”

  Even now people looked. As the man started the engine and set the vehicle to rumbling — not near so pleasant as the train — they looked, but it wasn’t the vehicle they admired. It was Cressida. She was something from a place Jackson couldn’t find a name for. With her honey hair piled tall and a fox face peeking at the world from her collar, Jackson had no idea what to make of her.

  When the fur around Cressida’s shoulders moved, Jackson thought it was her shifting as the vehicle pulled into the street. But Cressida stayed still. The fox face in her stole turned to pin Jackson with a violet look. Jackson stared back, skin as thin as water. The fox — if that’s what it was — took a long breath, then curled back around.

  They moved deeper into the city and as the scent of the ocean retreated, there came smoke and metal and something sweet. Nearly identical buildings lined long streets, gray and cinnamon stone facades with arched doorways and windows, and Jackson wondered how he would ever learn this place. The streets were tilted up and down by turns, a city on hills.