The Rope Eater

by Ben Jones

  My fever broke finally, and the days took on their relentless march again, neither slower nor faster, the only shift the wobbly sun that staggered up and fell back for a few hours each day.

  nineteen

  The sun had brought storms with it, and we were often confined to the hut. When the sky cleared, we dragged ourselves out, blinking like cave creatures at the bright new world around us. Inside the hut, I spent my time by Reinhold.

  His mind struggled fiercely in these days to drive his limbs through the pain. His forehead would crease with concentration as he dragged himself from his bed to the entrance of the hut, hanging his head and panting, then pressing on again. Unlike Creely, who had the blessing of incoherence, he was fully aware of his debilitation. His eyes glared out like beacons from within his bag. Each failure to rise brought a mounting fury; his will pushed out into his body, trying to force it into motion, and his body collapsed under the onslaught. He would lie facedown on the floor, grinding his teeth and growling, and then heave himself forward until he reached the end of the hut, and then turn and come back. In all it was about fifteen feet each way, and it took him nearly an hour. Finally he would collapse into his bag, exhausted and enraged, and lie facing the wall, the rage rising from his back in waves like heat.

  Despite the pleading of the doctor, he refused to stay in his bag; when they bound him in, he threw himself over and inched like a worm, groaning with the pain. When they restored him to his place, I moved beside him.

  “Slow down there, Magellan. You won’t make it around the Horn today.”

  He managed a weak smile and leaned over to whisper in my ear. “It’s open eyes that see, my friend.”

  “What?”

  “The ice is breaking up and we’ll need to be ready to go when it does, not dragging around here.”

  “So the captain said. But we haven’t the food or fuel or rest to be marching. We wouldn’t get a mile.”

  “We get plenty of food; that’s not the problem.”

  I laughed despite myself. “Warm water and lichen with a dash of roasted leather?”

  “It’s the what and not how much.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The doctor’s planning another trip north. By himself this time.”

  “He doesn’t have the supplies. He might make it back to the Barrier, but not over it, or through. Even he doesn’t have the strength for that.”

  “He’d need to be a lot stronger.”

  “Yes.”

  “Lots of heavy, hot meals to build him back up again.”

  “Exactly. Not just fox bones and shrimp.”

  Reinhold watched my face, as if I were a small child watching him do a card trick, earnestly trying to find the coin that had disappeared. “And where will that come from?” he asked.

  “Well, if the hunting improves with the weather, I guess that would be a start, if he convinces the captain to try again. I can’t imagine Griffin would risk it.”

  “He won’t. And the hunting won’t get better.”

  “It won’t?”

  He shook his head. “Why does the doctor need to hunt when he’s got all that he needs?”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “Look at us,” he hissed, “penned in like cattle and chewing on our cuds. He’s just got to put some meat on us and we’re ripe.”

  “But we’ll get strong again if we eat.”

  Reinhold began to look exasperated with me. “Look,” he said, “we’ve been here all winter and not one of us has died. Not one— winter journeys, man hauling over the ice, months of darkness and cold. Not one. And now, just as the sun comes back, we start dying. Game is returning, yet there is nothing to eat. We get fevers, which he has explained that we cannot get. We go mad. Except for him, and he is getting stronger every day, did you notice? The only one among us.”

  “I’m getting better, and Adney and Ash are still strong.”

  “You’re too dumb to stay sick, even for your own good,” he said, laughing, and then bit it off as the doctor came back into the hut. Reinhold shook his head at me and sat back, pretending to sleep. When the doctor approached, he groaned heavily and rolled his head back.

  “Reinhold?” said the doctor, shaking his foot, “are you feeling better?” He did not respond, but lay limply, his head angled unnaturally to the side.

  “Kane? Has he come round?”

  “No sir, sleeping gently until just now.”

  “I see,” said the doctor. “Please get me if he comes around, will you?” He made his way back out and Reinhold rolled over to me.

  “See what I mean?” he whispered.

  “No.”

  “He’s preparing all the food now and giving us all a little something special—lets us eat but stay weak. Ash is his prize pony—strong and healthy, but no will to act. Adney eats on the hunt. One for the camp, one for himself. I’d do the same. He’ll be a problem. For the rest of us, he’s just waiting to knock us off so he can pack up and be on his way. But Creely and the captain, stubborn old bastards, aren’t keeping to his schedule.”

  “But how long has he been at it? Since we came back from the Barrier?”

  “Hume,” said Reinhold decisively. “Healthy men don’t just die. Why do you think he wanted to do the autopsy? And then no word about it afterwards. He was doing a trial run, see how his specially designed food worked. Then West on the trip up. He was hoping to cache him at the base of the Barrier, for the trip back. He’s got it all marked out in his book.”

  Adney and the doctor came back inside to prepare the midday meal and Reinhold lolled his head back, but winked at me, as if this were all a great game. When the doctor put a mug to Reinhold’s lips, he pushed his tongue up and out and let the hoosh run down over his face. I took my mug and stared into it, and then over at Reinhold’s prone form. I raised it to my face to smell it and he jerked and cried out, knocking it from my grasp, then grunted and shook and pretended to lapse back into unconsciousness.

  “Kane!” said the doctor sharply. “You clumsy . . . I’m afraid there is no more.”

  Reinhold, his eyes shut, nodded triumphantly.

  We did not have a chance to speak again until the following morning; I elected to eat, and I watched the doctor carefully, but could see nothing amiss in his preparation of the food. When he headed out to hunt, Reinhold wriggled over to me again.

  In hushed tones, he unrolled the whole of the doctor’s plans— times, places, symptoms. He explained the course of the doctor’s peculiar posion, of how, with slight variations for our constitutions, it functioned in exactly the same way for each of us—where it had started to take hold and the signs of its progression through our systems, of the alterations the doctor had been forced to make following the bear attacks (“Me out and Adney in”). He explained that he had read through the doctor’s book while we were at the Barrier, had seen the annotated charts, with the correct tunnel clearly marked (“He hoped to cache you there for the next time through”); he had also seen the schedule of dosages and dates, and they were coming to an end.

  “Easter Sunday,” he said. “You can’t say the man doesn’t have a sense of humor.”

  I began to see the doctor as I had never seen him, in all his cunning and baseness and patient evil; I could see that what I had taken for pride and a desire for glory was in fact a cold and brutal greed.

  “What do we do? Will we have to kill him?”

  “Not yet,” said Reinhold. “Hold yourself in. Don’t eat his food. Gather your strength. We’ll have our reckoning.”

  “Who knows? Anyone?”

  “No one. Maybe Ash, the others, nothing. The shock’d kill them now in any case.”

  The next days were filled with terror. I watched the doctor constantly, waiting to see him betray himself. I stayed with Reinhold when the doctor did his inspections, and I poured my hoosh onto the ground from my lap, holding back only what small fragments of meat there were.

  I volunteered to mind the nets, an
d the doctor cautiously agreed. I barely had the strength to walk, and was forced to stop frequently to gather my breath as the ground swam around me. Once the net was too full, and I could not pull it onto the ice, but was forced to dump out half the catch before I could haul it out. I ate handfuls of the shrimp raw, looking around quickly to make sure I was alone. The shells cut my crumbling gums badly, but it was good to have something in my stomach.

  Every time I returned, I crept in as silently as I could, expecting to see Architeuthis hunched over Creely or the captain, strangling them with quiet satisfaction. The doctor, for his part, refused to reveal himself. He lingered over breakfast, speculating idly about temperatures and the state of the ice; he spent an hour talking to the insensible Creely. As he approached the captain, I descended, watching every twitch of his long fingers, each flick of his canine teeth. He seemed not to notice me hovering by him, as he listened, his face grave with false concern, to the captain’s heartbeat and breathing.

  My heart rose in terror as I saw his long fingers encircle Griffin’s white neck, and his thumbs slid over the windpipe. He’s toying with me, I thought, showing me how easily he could kill the captain. I thought he might even have had the barest smile playing about his lips. He rolled Griffin’s head back and forth in his hands and set it gently back down on the bag.

  “I don’t know what is keeping you alive, Master Griffin,” he said lightly, “but we’ll all pray it keeps up.”

  After dinner that night, Reinhold urged me to stay up, to watch the doctor, as Easter was now only two weeks away and he would be getting anxious to carry out his slaughter—wholesale if need be. I tried to remain awake, but could not. I had so little physical volition in any case, I could make few demands. I lay in my bag, listening to the doctor’s breathing, which was tauntingly loud, and to the stiff beat of my heart. My sleep came with a violent suddenness, a black blow that felled me until late in the morning. I awoke choking and spitting, trying to clear my mouth of anything that may have been placed there during the night. I was ashamed of having fallen asleep, and could feel the rebuke of Reinhold’s glare all morning.

  That day was the same routine—the same lengthy examinations by the doctor, the same unacknowledged dance of threat and counterthreat, the same stagger to the catch, and furtive shrimp eating. In the night, the same fight to stay awake—this time stabbing my hand on an exposed nail head; the same dreamless sleep struck me, and I awoke to the same guilty dread, the same feel of poisons in my mouth.

  Dr. Architeuthis took notice of my fatigue and my strange behavior, and tried to minister to me. He made a great show of examining me, running his fingers over my head and neck with awful slowness, and listening with satisfaction to my heart.

  “It is his secret pride,” whispered Reinhold to me that night, “that he can get to you. If you die, he shall win; the others cannot feed themselves. Could you hear him gloating as he examined you? He knows he is close and he is beginning to slaver. You must be strong.”

  Reinhold, for his part, was possessed of a new and seemingly limitless manic energy. He ate none of the hooshes, though I fed him shrimp when I could. He had ceased to pretend to sleep and instead sat at the end of the hut glaring out at everyone as the candle was extinguished. In the dark cold that marked the end of sleep, he would be sitting there still, like a granite statue at the gates of a pagan temple. I became increasingly exhausted as I tried to gather the shrimp and dodge the doctor. In order to avoid examinations, I put on great shows of health and good cheer, volunteering for extra duties to put him off and frustrate him, goaded by Reinhold at the end of the hut. That night Reinhold shook me out of my sleep, from blackness into blackness—I thought for a moment that my blindness had returned.

  “Kane, blast you, wake up!” Reinhold took my head in his meaty hand and pressed my ear to his mouth.

  “It’s nearly time, and the doctor has stepped up his efforts. He is cleverer than I thought—he’s been mixing it with spirits and leaking it in through the wall of the boat. I tore up my undershirt and stuffed it into the cracks to blunt it, but it is still getting through—the stench is terrible.” I could smell nothing.

  “We have three days to stockpile the shrimp; make a cache on the ridge; I will get a rifle. In the meantime, watch your step!”

  I slept again, but did not rest; I woke more exhausted and more wretched than the night before. A storm had blown up in the early hours of the morning, so we were all confined to the hut. Without even my sorry shrimp I was starving, and the smell of the hoosh was strong and rich—surely old fox bones could not do so much to water. I sat with my mug in my lap and thought of guzzling it, but did not. I turned to Reinhold and was shocked to see him glaring at me. He leaned over and spat a single word in my face: “Traitor!”

  His eyes were wide in their sockets and blazing; they were empty of any recognition of me, of any thought, of any process at all—he saw an odious insect before him. His head turned at an unnatural angle, and he pressed forward. I dropped my cup and fell backward over Creely, who lay still in the middle.

  “What do you mean? I have done nothing.”

  “Reinhold!” said Adney sharply. “What’s wrong?”

  “What, puppet? Time to cast me out?”

  “Reinhold!” said the doctor. “Please, calm down.”

  Griffin reached out now to restrain him, and Reinhold struck him with sudden violence, using a large sharp stone he had hidden in his sleeve. He rose up with a roar, tearing off the roof of the hut and bringing the wind howling in. Glaring down at us, he swung the rock back and forth. In his other hand, he produced a long spike.

  “I will remain,” he bellowed, “here, at the side of my companions. I. I am not lost.” He spun the spike in his hand with deliberate slowness, and brought it to rest over his palm, point down over the gunnel.

  “Here,” he said with emphasis, and drove the spike down into his hand with great force. A gush of blood spattered my face.

  “Reinhold, for God’s sake, please,” said Adney and lunged forward. Reinhold struck him backhanded with the rock and sent him crashing into the tarp.

  Turning back to his hand, blood oozing now from around the spike, he looked softly at it, as if it were a small animal he had nursed but could not save. He raised the rock and in three strokes drove it fully home. Then he turned back to us; he ground his teeth, and his body shook with ragged gasps. Over us, the wind rose, keening, and he rose, up over his pinned hand, a great beast, wailing. He turned his fury to the boat, hammering blows upon it, cursing, mumbling; he thrashed it free from its mooring in the ice and scattered our supplies. We huddled numbly in our bags as the wind lashed us. Reinhold heaved the boat up the beach away from us, though it must have weighed more than five hundred pounds. He screamed and bellowed, and tore at his clothes.

  I watched him as long as I could bear it, long after I became numb, after I had ceased to feel the lash of wind and the burn of my freezing skin. I began to feel that sweet drowsiness that I had heard in so many sailor’s stories, as if I were swaying in a hammock filled with down, weightless at last and adrift. I awoke to the jerk of my head against the ice, stirred by the merciless stomp of my heart, called to witness as my friend destroyed himself.

  Ash and Adney pulled the tarp over us, and the doctor moved to help Griffin; we huddled together, listening hour after hour as Reinhold’s great strength spent itself, dissipated, and renewed against the wind. Storm rose and wind, and the scrape and cry grew fainter, and still my obdurate heart held me up and the black blow would not descend. The storm blew out and he scrabbled on, wrenching the boat over the rocks, falling and rising, indomitable. Ash and Adney emerged and pried him loose from his mooring, gathered him up, and swaddled him in blankets. He had torn away his coat and shirt and his great chest heaved still. They laid him gently among us.

  Preston coughed roughly and groaned, and then Reinhold began to sing in his rumbling bass. It was a shanty, and his voice landed softly on the pulses, as i
f he were still hauling rope. His voice was wavering, but clear; it rose at the final chorus and passed into silence. I felt tears spilling down my face and the weight of my hands hanging limply in my lap; I heard Adney’s voice low and fierce and angry and finally doleful.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t. Don’t.”

  In the morning, Adney and I cleaned and dressed Reinhold’s body in shirt and coat, Adney taking the time to straighten the tufted clumps of hair over his brow and pull up his collar smartly. I buffed his boots gently with my gloves. Adney hauled in the bag we had ruined on our trip north and cut free the liner. We wrapped him inside and Adney sewed it shut with careful strokes. The doctor, Adney, Ash, and I carried him on our shoulders to the low gravel ridge above the camp. Adney sank to his knees and began to hammer and pry. I took my place beside him. Rock by rock we beat our way down into the frozen gravel. I used my hands and then loose rocks to work the stones free. The wind rose around us, and the rocks slowly gave way. We made a hole, such as it was, and laid Reinhold in it. I stood back and Adney piled rocks high over him, adding, at the top, a red scrap of his shirt.

  Griffin, his head bandaged, limped up to the ridge, followed by the doctor and Ash bearing Creely between them. Griffin spoke softly into the soft wind.

  His voice faded, and Adney’s swelled in a hymn and we joined in, even Creely, bobbing his head to keep the time. I imagined that on a small and distant lane, in a plain and peeling white spire, my lone grief struck a lone bell, and that one unruly tongue flung out broad its grief. That sound spread wordlessly, passed from man to man, and then from bell to bell—a wave of bells, like candles lit from candles, that rolled across the land.

  twenty

  The doctor and the captain began a low debate about the arrival of Easter. Captain Griffin thought it essential to have a small service and celebration, while the doctor felt that the condition of the men was so slight that any deviation was likely to prove fatal—that they were now as vulnerable to good news as bad.