The Rope Eater

by Ben Jones

  A mug was set before me and I drank. I could not navigate between treachery and survival—if I was to be poisoned, so be it, so I could slide into easefulness, so pass, so end. But my strength returned with the attentions of the doctor. Adney had some small luck on the hunt: a fox, shrimp, our first goose, pale char. We had finished the candles, so we ate the meat raw and quickly, before it froze. We passed the days in silence, wraiths; only Creely jittered and mumbled. I was able to resume fishing, though I relied on a length of thwart to support me.

  On Maundy Thursday, the captain ordered a fire from the remaining wood so that he could have water to wash our feet. The doctor protested the extravagance, but relented. It made me uneasy, as I did not share the captain’s faith, but it seemed to give him such peace and calm that I did not deny him. My feet emerged at a great distance from me, yellow-white and angular, and he passed over them with a gentle wash of water, his head low in the quiet night. My hands before me in my lap were covered with cuts—dozens of them, open and not healing, nicked and battered, my hands like stone that has sat in the teeth of the wind for many years. And yet there was along the back of my hand a single vein, pulsing and alive, carrying with it the small and secret voice that spoke ineluctably of life.

  The gray morning brought warm air with it, damp and earthy, as if the whole world were not ice; the pack did not move—indeed lay silent, suspicious—but as I moved across it to the nets, I could feel the rush of currents far below. Another gray morning, but then the sun blazed up and the sky showered down blue, and the ice seemed to tense, as if it were preparing to heave off the pack and cast up fresh continents of fruit. The nets were full and the lines wriggled with fish.

  As I returned, I saw the doctor up on the ridge. I made my way to the shore and was about to call out our good fortune, but paused. He was kneeling over the piled stones, oddly animated in his devotions. From his hand there was the brilliant flash of polished steel in the sun—a blade, and the doctor, his hands bloody, chewing.

  I rushed into the hut and dropped my load. I took the net and my bag; I filled my pockets with shrimp and I fled.

  South I ran, along the shore, not looking behind, not daring to pause, resting only by leaning on the thwart and off again, repulsed and horrified, through the night and the next day, grabbing handfuls of raw shrimp and snow that burned like acid, crashing down onto the gravel and heaving up again. I scraped lichen from the rocks and cut blocks of snow to form a tunnel with a small hollow at the top for a fire. I looked for a place to batter a hole into the ice, but it was too thick. So I crawled in and lit my small fire close to my face and slept.

  And on like this I went, sometimes finding lichen to eat, sometimes a spot to lower the line, sometimes a shelter, and sometimes huddled in my bag waiting for the dark hours to pass. I became better at making the shelters and, with a small blaze of debris, could get warm for an evening before pushing on.

  Five days brought me to the bottom of the land; the low hills curved away to the east, and before me stretched the pack. I built a more substantial shelter on the shore to take the time to gather some fuel and fish. Wind kept the headland clear, and in the lee of the shore, open to the sun, there was a miniature forest of shrubs and dwarf trees, like a hidden world, just emerging from the snow. Digging out the hollow for my shelter, I dislodged a stone; behind it sat a small cluster of hibernating bees, small enough to sit in the palm of my hand. Even as I held it, the bees remained stuck tight to each other, and the ball gave off a low blush of heat. They were bitter and weightless, like a mouthful of air.

  I found a shoal offshore, where the ice had split among the rocks and I could dig my way down to the water. I gave myself two days to rest and fish, and then move along. I kept my mind away from my companions, from the dark and ghoulish hut. Even as I imagined the outline of the camp in the distance, my heart began to race and I struggled not to flee across the ice in that moment. Only the steady work of gathering the lichens and fishing, which exhausted me into rapid sleep, let me stay on the shore— that shore that still felt tied to the repugnance I had seen, that I could still see, of strips of flesh sliding between teeth and tearing.

  By the afternoon of the second day I had two fish, and a substantial heap of material for fuel. I resolved to be off at first light, but the wind rose and the temperature dropped and I huddled miserably in my hut, bobbing with eagerness to get away. I kept my small fire burning and listened to the scrape and moan of the wind and fought to think of nothing.

  Then a sound came from out of the storm of immediate and substantial form, and then a gust that nearly extinguished my fire, and into my shelter pushed the wolfish face of Dr. Architeuthis.

  twenty-one

  He brushed aside my small fire and produced a lamp and a strip of blubber to feed it. Soon the fire was blazing, and a hoosh being made with thick cubes of dark seal meat. The doctor kept his eyes on the pot.

  “Adney got a seal. Leads are opening to the north.”

  Hunger—which had been my companion, and weak and dim as I was weak and dim—now reared, and I craved the taste of meat again, and the heat of the hoosh. My mouth flooded.

  “What was your plan, Kane? We thought you’d fallen through, but when I saw that your bag was gone I figured you had decided to take your chances on the ice.”

  He took a full mug of hoosh and handed me the pot. I singed my fingers on the sides as I gulped it greedily while avoiding his steady gaze. When he spoke again, his voice had a pleased resolve in it.

  “From here, we can go south and east over the pack; the ice should be moving within a week, so we have some time to prepare. If we can work our way over Jones Sound to the west, we will be released into Baffin Bay and the whalers will pick us up. It is less than two hundred miles, and with the two of us strong, we should have no trouble making it if the weather holds.”

  And so he settled back against his bag to sleep. He made no mention of his own actions, of the men we had abandoned to their deaths, of the whole complex of duty and obligation and mercy— only forward. His pack was neatly filled behind him with useful items, and his hood recently mended. His bag had been scraped clean of moisture and rested lightly on the gravel. I sat in that dimness, the light crawling over his face, and I feared him and loathed him and was horrified by him, and by myself and the horror of the days that had brought us here.

  Now I can say of that moment that I feared for my life, that I was unbalanced by hatred, by hunger and cold and a thousand deprivations, that I sat over him as he slept and was without a choice in my actions, that I was justified, excused, that other men would have done the same as I. And to be sure those things brought me to the edge, those cleared the way for me to act as I did, but the truth is different—that it was not justice, though some justice was done by it, and not righteousness, though I could take that mantle on; I felt within me, hovering, a choice of light and darkness, and chose, and embraced and relished in that moment the dark root I had within me, and I raised up the thwart and struck him in the head, and again and again until my hands were covered in his blood and he, at last, was dead.

  Out into the storm I passed, taking in my appetite his food and gear and my own supplies, out over the ice, which in the storm was rolling and cracking under me. I ran to exhaustion and ate rawly from my pack, and huddled in my bag to sleep. Over me the wind keened and the snow pelted at me in the gusts. Even as the storm died, the pack was now in motion around me, floes crashing into floes, sending up cascades of water, swirling as I stood on them, bearing me out to sea. I jumped from floe to floe and used the thwart to vault over the gaps, and to pull floes closer to me. I spent three days on the ice, spinning, descending, in motion if I was conscious, insensible now to the cold and wet, only moving.

  In a gray dawn, I saw shoreline to the south, and against it a jagged black shape, indistinct in the light, but made up of created shapes and angles. I rushed forward not daring to hope—it was the ship! My heart sang in me and I shouted and laug
hed and ran now, heedless of my stumbling and bruising on legs stiff and dead. I leapt from floe to floe, sliding here and there into the water, and scrambling up again.

  It was much as we had left it—no more split nor sunk— driven forward with her stern in the same gesture of submission to the ice, and partially submerged. The mainmast lay still over the shattered roof of the deckhouse, and the foremast jabbed out at the ice. The rigging was shredded and ice draped, the wispy remnants of shrouds still carrying their wreaths of frost. Even thus trapped, thus stripped and broken, the ship retained its dark strength, not haughty but resilient.

  I called out from the ice and beat the hull with my hands. I scrambled up the banked snow at the bow and onto the deck. The fore hatch was submerged beneath the ice. I climbed up the fallen mast to the splinters of the deckhouse. The hatch had been cleared of debris and kept clear of the drifting snow. I pulled open the hatch and the gray light slunk a few feet inside. A pile of ash from the deckhouse stove was swept neatly into the corner. The interior silence was as an ancient tomb’s, not only lost itself, but in the lost city of a lost land, and holding within itself a forgotten king of a forgotten people; there was no rustle of hidden life, no hint of link to the world I inhabited, to my lost present. Lashing open the hatch, I entered as a thief or boy—hardly daring to breathe, curious, ashamed, audacious.

  The cabins were untouched and unlived in; there was no fine wash of dust, no hint of decay, no smell of rot, no spiderwebbed corners. I recalled the nightmarish haste of our departure, the rush of terror in the storm, the suffering of Pago, the crack of ice and the bellowing confusion of the men, the sickening rush to beat down the dogs and escape. It bore no relation to this silent, dreadful room: there was no rush of life and fear here, but the silence and stillness of death held through these months, through a thousand years, unregenerate and unrenewed. In the gray light, Hume’s quarters looked wretched and naked, the light dwelling on patch and hole, on the worn, the broken, the insufficient and incomplete.

  I gathered some pages from a book, made a cone of canvas, and struck my flint into it. A weak and smoky flame straggled to life; it flared briefly as each page caught, then subsided again. I filled my pockets with pages, and scraps of the pitch-soaked canvas, and headed into the laboratory. Its walls were crowded with the doctor’s instruments and racks of glass tubes and bottles, all labeled with his precise handwriting. A few of the bottles had shattered when their contents froze, but the contents stood still, holding the shape of the bottle over the halo of broken glass. Against the windows, the terrariums had shattered and the ouroborus vines lay wrestling in a baleful heap, tendrils already climbing again toward the light. In the center stood his marble slab, pure white and smooth, with its low channel running around the edge to the drain in the corner. It was all clean and precise in the wavering light; much, I imagined, shuddering, as he would have hoped to find it.

  The next cabin was the captain’s, which I had never seen; I glanced inside to see if Aziz had perhaps installed himself there as the new master of the ship. The captain’s few belongings remained neatly placed. A pile of clothes on the bed was frayed and mended, but neat and clean for all of their hard service. An extra set of boots stood at the foot of the bunk, deeply pitted and scraped, but polished. There was little else—he was a man unencumbered by frivolities, simple as faith itself.

  The final cabin was West’s, which I had also never entered. I paused at the doorway, half expecting his mad face to come shrieking out. The cabin was surprisingly empty, almost ascetic. A bare table and chair, a bare and comfortless bed, and a tiny chest. The Pianola, tormentor of our storm-struck nights, stood next to the bed. I saw then West’s face again, contorted with hatred and anger, a carnivore, with the tendons of his thumb trailing from his mouth.

  I turned again and stumbled aft. I was surprised to find the hatch open but ladderless. I hung over the edge and swung the torch around. Below me I could see empty sacks and a loose pile of broken things—tools and fittings stripped to their last splinter of wood. Scraps of the books sat neatly in the corner beside the fire bow of Aziz and a pile of shavings in a blackened circle; next to it was a pile of kindling in the bottom of the coal scuttle and a tattered pile of bedding. I called out eagerly, but there was no response. A series of bent nails pounded into the aft wall led up from the pile of shavings—the remains of the ladder still embedded in the wall. Clutching my smoldering torch, I clambered painfully down on the nails and dropped to the floor.

  A closer inspection of the boiler room revealed nothing new—no remains of food or animals, no clothing, no trace of where he was or might have gone. I refilled my torch with canvas and pages and turned to the door into the hold.

  It pushed open easily, and the light leapt up in the darkness. The hold was huge and empty, the torch barely reaching the walls and leaving the ceiling hidden. I clung to the wall and stared out into that minotaur darkness; it seemed fluid and palpable, not empty as the cabins had been, dancing away from my torch as a page flared and flowing forward as it died. Edging ahead, I kept my hand on the wall to keep my balance; the bottom of the hull was covered by ice, so I had to move carefully. As I moved, my fingers kept catching on the wood. I was not getting splinters, but my rough fingertips would hook as I tried to glide them over the surface. Given the pitch polish of the English oak, I was surprised by the roughness.

  I leaned to the wall to examine it and was shocked to see it scarred and pitted over every inch of its surface. I threw a handful of pages into my torch and held it right next to my face. As I stared, it resolved into minute and intricate patterns. It was a script, tiny and densely layered; each line was less than an inch high and the lines were piled over on top of one another, up into the darkness and down into the ice. It flowed and shrank, advanced, wove. My eye was sucked into it and compelled to follow it as it leapt and danced and dove. I could not read it, and yet it seized me, turned me to it, burned itself into me. Each letter, each line pulled me on, leading me forward, deeper into it, a story incomprehensible and infinite, fierce and sad and despondent, beautiful and terrible, a final reckoning that demanded and compelled, etched in that granite wood. Eyes upward and fixed, I tripped over something lodged in the ice and my torch scattered into sparks. I pulled another page from my pocket and gathered the sparks to me; the torch sagged, then glowed to life again.

  Before me lay the body of Aziz half frozen in the ice. He was on his side, facing me, and his body was curled into a ball. His three hands were gathered into his chest, holding his silver teacup; they led one to the next, forming an even circle beneath his chin. His face was soft and peaceful, with none of the demonic gauntness of ours, like a sleeping child’s, coppery in the red light, and cleansed, as if he had pulled forth all the poisonous bile in his soul and poured it out onto the walls.

  I crawled to him and placed my hand on his shoulder; it was impossibly thin and frail, like a bird’s. By keeping my eyes fixed on his face, on his peacefulness, I could keep my eyes from his terrible work, the pull of darkness against the light. I stood, holding my eyes on him, and fled the room. Outside the hold, I threw my torch up through the hatch and climbed after it, ran down the corridor and out into the dusking afternoon.

  I sat on the deck panting, trying to still my heart and slow my breathing. Aziz’s revelation—whether blessing or curse, I knew not—filled me with dread and awe. He had unleashed something of the darkness in that hold; he had battled with it and left behind not spoils but carnage. Yet there was a terrible triumph in it, and in his face, though sunken and frozen, the peace of conquest, torn free from the slow slide of the rope that had driven him here. There was no hint that he had found the islands, or even that he had sought them. I could not imagine his wresting—blind, freezing, alone in this wasteland, calmly setting his fires and etching careful line after careful line into the wood of the hull. I shrank from my own thoughts; I had my own dark, blind, mad hours, each of us our own hours, our own wrestling, to be face
d in darkness, in blindness, in solitude—our revelations incommunicable and only our suffering in common. I thought of his story—of hiding for years in the holds of ships—his prison transformed into the means of his release, the four walls of his new freedom and the end to his quiet and solitary seeking.

  I thought back to happier days, to resting in his quarters by the boiler, to the taste of tea, and his quiet stories with the gentle roll of the ship beneath them. Even my heart fell into gentle murmuring, as if offering its own memorial to those faraway hours. I thought of him now, frozen, faced with his terrible work in the hold. I could not leave him there, peaceful though he seemed, to wreck and decay, to be scavenged. I had to free him somehow, mark his passing. My first impulse was to chip him free and carry him south. But whatever he had been—guide, wellspring, font, beacon—he was no longer; whatever power he had unleashed in his revelation, it was solitary; it was of this time and this awful place, frozen in it, as he was, and rooted, his alone the triumph.

  I thought of killing myself, but I could not face again the dank and freezing air of the ship. What remained was no shelter, no haven or comfort, nor even a tomb or sepulchre—no, it was a corpse, grotesque, naked, bloodless.

  And yet I did not merely flee, as I had so often in the past, did not turn my face and look for a new world that might be free of a consideration of him, an empty world as yet unstained by my error and weakness. I ascended again to the deck and went into the laboratory; even there I could feel the tug of his writing like the undertow from a distant storm, pulling the tide back from the shore. Gathering the books and remaining canvas into a pile, I made a small fire on top of the twisted ball of vines. Slowly I added whatever free wood remained—the bunks, whatever pieces of the Pianola I could wrest free. The blaze grew rapidly. The dark leaves of the vines were slow to catch, stubbornly resisting the lick of the flames, but then they caught too and burned fiercely bright. I retreated from the cabins to the deck and finally to the ice below.