The Kraken Sea

by E. Catherine Tobler

  He leaned in, to kiss the ash from her lips, and somehow beneath all the bitter, she remained sweet, tasting like jam-filled palmiers. Her mouth tipped upward under his and then she was gone, back to her work with the dead.

  The walk to the door was eternal. The ground always gave too much underfoot. When Jackson allowed himself to become what he was, he found he moved with ease, viper coils slithering over the sponge without stumbling. Foster and Gussie remained in the small closet-like space, crouched. Gussie’s knees were drawn to her chin and Foster was more solid and less green. The idea that Cressida sent him here was like an ice water dousing for Jackson. Foster was Cressida’s closest confidant. She had risked his loss in order to secure this place. Conversations to come nibbled at the edge of Jackson’s thoughts like fish with slippery mouths.

  He slid his ash-smeared hand against the lock mechanism and the door notched open. Gussie was through it in a flash, but she didn’t flee the basement. She lingered by the shelves, dripping with goo, her arms wrapped around her shoulders.

  “Not going to apologize.” Foster slurred through his misshapen mouth as Jackson lifted him out of the room and into the basement.

  Jackson slid his filthy hand back over the lock to close the door and watched as the metal consumed the ash and muck. When finished, the metal gleamed. He looked at Foster and then Gussie and nodded.

  “Doesn’t seem to be a thing to apologize for.”

  “How about kidnapping me?” Gussie asked. Her blonde locks dripped with underworld muck, splattering the floor in a ring beneath her. “How about tying me up, gagging me, and forcing me to do your —”

  “I asked nicely,” Foster said. “That did not work.”

  Gussie’s chin lifted, but she said nothing. Her blue eyes might have burned holes through Foster and Jackson both had she been anything but human. Jackson’s hand slid cautiously over Foster’s shoulder.

  “Can sit here ‘till you’re up for walking.”

  Foster nodded, wobbly and not entirely solid. Jackson helped pull his coat around Foster’s bent shoulders, then looked to Gussie.

  “How long’s Mae been coming here?” he asked.

  Gussie shook her head, then shuddered when tendrils of her hair stuck to her cheeks. More goo dripped onto the concrete floor. “I can’t remember her not coming here,” she said. “She’s always been.”

  “And Cressida?”

  There was another shudder when Jackson evoked that name. Gussie’s arms curled more tightly around her and he saw she was crying; the salt in her tears rose sharp in the room.

  “She’s always been, too. Mister Macquarie, he …” Gussie’s throat worked as she swallowed hard. “He tried to make peace, but it couldn’t be done. Charon said the work… The work won’t end, and we’re…we’re just on top of it all, and — T-that’s when Mister Macquarie brought the …” Another shudder; she couldn’t say the word and Jackson wondered what she had seen of it before, what the kraken had done in prior attempts.

  “Kraken,” Jackson said. The beast he’d had a hand in seeing killed. He looked at Foster, whose jaw was set firm. “Cressida meant for it to kill them once and for all.” It wasn’t a question, just a statement of fact, and when Foster nodded, Jackson stood relieved. He liked this man, the way he was unapologetically himself.

  Gussie moved from the shelves, shuffling her way toward a stack of linens. She brought towels, though Jackson had forgotten the muck he was covered in, focused as he was on where he needed to go next, where he needed to get Foster. When Foster could get his legs back under him, Gussie took their towels and stared at them from eyes gone hollow.

  “W-what happens now?” she asked.

  “Need to talk to Cressida,” Jackson said, and saw the panic well up in Gussie’s eyes to fill all those hollow spaces. “She won’t move on this place again.”

  Taken as a whole, they were big words from a still-young man. He wasn’t sure how, but he wouldn’t let it happen. The lines as drawn could not hold. The walk back to Macquarie’s took a lifetime; Jackson expected them to shuffle in as old, gray men, not the muck-damp things they were. In the entry, Foster buckled to his knees, coughing. Gold spilled from him, some of the coins given to Charon. They both stared at them in bafflement, but picked them up nonetheless, hiding them in pockets as Cressida approached.

  At the sight of her, the darkness within him unfolded, but he held it back, just beneath his skin where it served to fuel his anger. He couldn’t have this conversation here, not when they were just inside the doors, but Cressida knew that, too. With all the care of a human mother, she bundled Foster against her side and guided them both into the depths of the building, to her office.

  The glass flared with rioting hell horses, black amid the frosted pane. Jackson swallowed the shudder he felt; if he gave in to that feeling, he would slip from one skin into the next.

  Cressida saw Foster settled on her sofa, pressing him gently into the pillows and drawing her tea set close. She poured for him, a thing that had never happened, and pressed the steaming cup into his unsteady hands. She held him for a breath longer, then withdrew, to look at Jackson. Gauging. Saying nothing.

  “Don’t drink that tea,” Jackson said.

  He didn’t know, couldn’t be sure, but Cressida knew when things went her way and she knew when they did not. And if she had been willing to risk sending Foster to the underworld, why wouldn’t she move against him when he failed in this thing?

  She went still. It was small, considering all that followed, but Jackson would remember it. Would remember the blankness that moved across her green eyes, only a surface thing, transient. She blinked and came back, to the realization that things had shifted.

  “Don’t be foolish,” Cressida said with a laugh, even as Foster leaned forward and set the cup down on the table — the table that was a table now, no longer a metal box filled with leaking blackness. “Tell me what happened, is all secure?”

  He felt small in the close room, as though the walls were retreating, to leave him and Cressida alone in the dark. She was telling him to be himself and punishing him for being that very thing. Now, with each breath he took, Jackson allowed himself to be more of what he was. It started with his feet, shoes long since lost to the underworld.

  “It depends greatly which viewpoint you use,” Jackson said. His feet vanished in a rush of black scaled skin that turned itself inside out as coils erupted across the carpets. “My viewpoint is this: the bakery, and what it contains, is secure, because you won’t touch it again.”

  He was so small, the floor seeming to crumble beneath him as Cressida rose from her chair. Foster fell into the blackness with the walls, parts of the world receding because he did not need them. Needed only himself and her, to …

  To what?

  “You dare question my reach?”

  Did he? “You claim to respect lines —”

  Cressida’s laughter cut his words off. Her hand slid over his, sudden and warm, the sound of rustling beetles. “Until I can change them.”

  The first snap was like a twig, a sharp scent of sap rising in the black. He wasn’t sure what it was until he saw the queer way his smallest finger dangled, broken in its fleshy guise. The pain was liquid and hot, rushing up wrist and forearm. It hit his elbow and then the second snap, another finger broken in Cressida’s hold. Jackson buckled, pain stealing his focus. He was going to — Do something. Move something. Change something. But now …

  His hand was on fire, Cressida breaking bones one by one. He screamed and there were words, but they were incoherent. Hers came through, condemnation.

  “How dare you? How dare you forsake this? Our house, our home. Our family.” Her voice trembled on that word and through the pain Jackson didn’t know if it was honest or not. “Such a tiny thing that no one wanted because you were too strange. Because you changed in the night, soiled your bed with things you could not rightly explain. Little box boy no one wanted. Only me.”

  She moved lik
e fire through splintered timber, inhuman then, drawing on whatever sources she could call to hand. The hell horses in the door burst out of the glass, troops rallied to her cause. With a scream, Jackson shifted forms, forcing his broken fingers away, so the blackness might writhe from him. But even these parts of him were broken, aflame. He reached back with one tentacled arm to sweep the horses to the ground. They shattered into glass fragments.

  Cressida countered with a small metal box. Jackson lifted his hand again, to sweep it away too, but brightness burned from the box as she opened it, and he could only stare.

  There were no shadow creatures, when Jackson would have welcomed them. His breath left him when he gazed on the severed hand that rested on a bed of straw. It looked small there, not blue or pale the way it should be, but flushed with the color of life. The fingers were bent inward toward the palm, where it held a golden cross. This cross gleamed at Jackson, showed him his own reflection back again, showed him all he could never be — told him to trust all he was.

  If Cressida had thought the hand would be his undoing, she was right — but likely not in the way she expected. Jackson’s human form fell fully away as he embraced himself in a way he had not yet. Though he was weak-kneed and broken-handed, he did not crumple to the carpets and sob for Sister Jerome Grace. If she had known he had to come to this place, she knew this place contained this point in time. If she did not know of the underworld, surely she understood that all things created come to an end.

  Jackson moved with thought and instinct both, taking Cressida into his broken, writhing hands. She was bubbling soda, her own skin giving birth to something Other, but this never fully came to pass. There was that fizzy feeling, the near-eruption, but Jackson’s hands on her kept her from finding that form. Jackson shoved her into the floor, the metal box tumbling away. He wrapped his hands around and around her throat, until she gasped for breath, until she pleaded.

  “Don’t —”

  Jackson forced the question past his misshapen mouth, grip never easing. “Why would you take such a thing from this world?”

  She struggled to free herself from his hands, but could not, and laughed even so. “If I cannot have eternity, why should anything be born? She abandoned you to this awful world. I chose you! I chose you!”

  If things could no longer be born, things could surely still die. Jackson did not release her. Not when her eyes rolled back. Not when her mouth gaped for air like a landed fish. Not when she thrashed and then went terribly still. He held her tight and tighter until there was a touch on his shoulder, and another touch on his hand. He was aware of Mae and Beth, even if he didn’t properly see them. They were a whisper of air as threads were drawn up and out, as Mae measured and Beth cut. Jackson could not say if he imagined the glee in Beth’s eye at the cutting of these threads. It tasted like broken orange slices against his tongue.

  Neither Mae nor Beth tried to uncoil his hands from Cressida, but neither did they leave his side. They vibrated the way dragonfly wings did in summer air. When at last he could relax and pull himself from the body, he brought himself back into his human skin, too. In tattered clothing and shivering, he crouched before the metal box and drew it close. The sister’s hand rested there and as he watched, countless threads unspooled from the severed wrist. Innumerable. Growing. Breathing.

  §

  He left before anyone could talk him out of it, heedless of anything but the need to get away. With his ruined hands, he drew his suitcase from the shelf and carefully opened it. Every motion was agony. One change of clothes, one metal box, spare shoes. He couldn’t fathom ever tying shoes again, but wouldn’t leave them. He found it strange when the metal box holding the sister’s hand fit into the suitcase perfectly. As though one had been made for the other.

  The halls of Macquarie’s stood quiet. He clutched his suitcase against his chest and paused in the darkened lobby, listening to the building breathe — he pictured it as Foster’s breath, the deep and regular sounds of a body repairing itself. What became of it was not his concern and yet he found himself reluctant to go. He thought of the performers here, told himself he didn’t care. Even as he walked the dark path to Cressida’s office, he told himself he didn’t care.

  He closed himself into the space where she had died

  (where he had killed her)

  and closed the door behind him. The broken glass was empty, all creatures flown. He liked to imagine they had been released, and were in their proper places now that they were no longer trapped in the glass. He didn’t know, but he liked to pretend.

  He went to Cressida’s desk, opening the drawers one by one. He didn’t care for most of what he saw — it didn’t matter, not even the small dried krakens she had strung on a rope of pearls. They weren’t what he sought. Neither was the box of gold coins and carefully stacked bills, but he wasn’t above taking these, understanding he would need them if he meant to make his way in the city. In the world.

  What he truly sought had been pressed into a book he found atop the shelf in the sitting room. He pulled the book down with a shuddering cry at the pain this caused his hands, and opened it where the ivory ribbons spilled. He drew out the paper lions, carefully smoothed flat once more, and kicked the book away.

  He left before he could talk himself out of it. He knew the city forwards and backwards, but it remained an alien thing tonight, no moon above to light his way. He opted for Chinatown, disregarding the way his heart tugged him north. Perhaps the territorial lines had been erased with Cressida’s death, perhaps they hadn’t. The Bells would do what they did, as they had always done.

  Chinatown needed no moon to light its streets. Jackson found them ever the same. Some people recognized him, gave him nods of courtesy and an ever-wide berth. He supposed this helped him find the small room above a restaurant leaking the scents of bao and soy from every crevice. He supposed he didn’t care. What he cared for was the hand in his suitcase, the fire escape outside his window, and the shadowed figure he imagined there through the night.

  §

  Morning came and with it the racket below. He wondered if the streets were ever quiet, and didn’t mind that they weren’t. He stood at the window and watched the way the people moved, the business they conducted. There was a bookstore across the street beside a vegetable market. A short way down, there was the place with gleaming ducks in the window. Jackson liked to count them; this morning, there were seventeen. He counted them twice in an effort to distract himself from the pain in his hands. It didn’t work. He tried to shift forms, but couldn’t get there, either; the pain was too much, all consuming.

  Before the sun could creep over the buildings, he left his room, taking a good five minutes to lock the door on his way out. His hands were near useless, the pain blinding, and the key was so small. He drew deeper into his coat as he left, taking to the alleys he knew so well. The den was easily found, if not by its shadowed doorway then by the sweet scent that bled down the length of the alleyway. He didn’t care that the room was already busy, these men likely having spent the evening in the dragon’s embrace. He cared that this smoke would take the pain away, that for a little while he would be able to escape what Cressida had done to him.

  They knew him here, but only as enforcer, not habitué. He was welcomed, the old Chinese men making low sounds in their throats when they noticed the wreck of his hands. They could be mended, they told him. Jackson shook them off, he wanted only the bliss of opium, wanted only this corner pallet and to be undisturbed.

  At first, he couldn’t hold the pipe himself, for the weight of it was agony in his hands. He snarled when the men offered their help; they wanted only to please, but he kicked them away, turned his shoulder to the wall, and found a way he could brace the pipe against his arm, against his knee, against anything that was not his fucking hand. He passed the morning this way, waking to the evening lanterns being lit, his body pleasantly numb.

  He paid them in gold, more than they asked. They drew a divider
around his pallet so he might have privacy in his agony, but there were hours spent sobbing, and this unnerved the others in the rooms. None ever asked what was wrong with him; they did not need to know, for they came with their own problems. As he did not ask of them (could not, for he was not aware of anything in those hours), they afforded him the same perceived kindness.

  Once, he thought Foster came. Later, he would tell himself it was ridiculous, but there were times he believed his familiar weight rested on his pallet, those wrinkled hands smelling of metal stroking his hair back from his sweaty face. He would have sworn it was Foster who tied him down and bent his fingers back into reasonable shapes even while Jackson screamed down the sky.

  He woke another time, arms tied down, the mouth of the pipe against his own. He drew a long draught of the smoke, feeling as though he were wrapped in cotton. If he looked past the wreath of smoke, there were lions peering down at him, blinking their large eyes, yawning their even larger mouths. When they turned, they were only paper, sliver-thin as they padded across the room and away.

  There was food — bao torn into small pieces, slipped into his mouth by fingers terribly familiar (soft, so soft, yet on some of the edges, calloused from using a whip). There was tea, sharp and green against his tongue in a cup as wide as the ocean. There were other things he could not name, all softly edged, smudged and running like ink in water. They passed in and out of his awareness like a dream, things he could not hold even if he possessed hands.

  His hands and the world came back to him slowly. When at last he could sit up and look around, he was disgusted with himself, called himself a coward, a fool, which the Chinese men agreed with. Slow nods, but they offered more tea, showed him where clean clothes awaited him, and helped him dress. These clothes reminded him of those Foster wore, roomy and easily tied shut, for his fingers could not manage buttons. He wondered if they ever would again.