Sargasso #2

by Gafford, Sam

  “The storm rolled in fast and hard. I couldn’t see even inches in front of me. I knew there were no boats in sight when the weather turned. I thought if I could just stay away from the shore—there was no danger of hitting other boats—we would be all right.” He stopped to catch his breath, so great was the effort to tell his story.

  “Rest. You don’t need to tell me more.”

  “No. Yes, I do. I need to tell you. Someone must know. Soon it will be over and no one will know. I must tell you now.” His voice was stronger. He was determined.

  “My wife was very frightened. She was not a sailor, nor was she a strong swimmer. I struggled to pull a life jacket out and I managed to get it on her. Then I was very grateful I was able to do that for her. Now?” His voice cracked, followed by a racking cough.

  “Our boat was small. Only eighteen feet. There was a swell. And another. They came too fast—there was no time to recover. We turned over. My wife was so frightened; she was screaming so loudly. . . . It was a blessing. I was able to find her thanks to her screaming. I could see nothing. Once I had her, I knew that our best chance of survival was to stay with the boat. I hugged her to me tightly and swam for the boat. But as fast as I could swim, the boat floated away even faster. I was tiring. I knew I needed another plan. I closed my eyes and prayed.”

  “There was a great wind. I swear it was like the breath of God pushing us to shore. But, it wasn’t the breath of God that carried us. It was something darker, something—dare I say?—infernal . . . a breath that sprang from the mouth of hell.” He paused; his breathing was labored, as though talking was a great physical exertion.

  “We washed up on some rocks. The battering we took was nothing against the relief we felt to be safe again on dry land.” She thought she could hear a catch behind the word “safe,” but she shook the thought out of her head. Her husband always said she projected her own thoughts onto other people. She cleared her mind to listen.

  “We noticed right away that any area that was not covered by rocks was completely swathed in green. It was a peculiarity of where we landed that absolutely nothing grew on the rocks—no moss, no lichen. The rocks were islands of barrenness in a land gone absolutely insane in its fecundity.”

  “I knew that if we were to survive in this unwelcoming place, we had to find a source of fresh water. I was confident we would find it; the green all around us was vibrant and alive. Nothing was wilted; you could practically hear the plants growing.

  “Exhausted as we were, we began to explore our surroundings. We brushed past weeds that stood as tall as we were, weeds that seemed to reach out to touch us. I pushed the thought aside; it was an unworthy fancy and I would not be distracted from our search for water.

  “The growth was so very dense and we were very much weakened by our wreck on the water. We were unable to make much headway away from shore. Every path was choked by the riotous growth. We were trapped, caged by endless walls of green. We decided to head back to where we had washed up, to rest for the night and investigate the shoreline in daylight.

  “The sun rose red and angry over the river that first morning; my wife and I rose the same. Waking meant the end of our dreams of safety and satiety. Imagine our joy when we spied the wreck of a ship about a mile north from where we landed. Weeds sprang from the vessel, but we hoped there might be some useful supplies and maybe some clues about the nature of this mysterious place. We made our way over to it and climbed aboard.

  “The first thing was the smell: abandonment. Clearly, no one had been on this ship for some time. The second thing: although the rocks the ship had crashed upon were gray and bare, the ship’s upper deck was overtaken by weeds. We noted that one weed in particular dominated—as tall as a man, with an outline that recalled a man in motion, though rooted firmly in place. Miraculously, the weeds had not penetrated below that top deck. In the cabin we found ship biscuit and some canned goods, but sweetest miracle of all, we found the holding tanks to be full of water. I reasoned that we could fill the tanks with rainwater as they emptied, and in that way we might stay alive until help arrived.

  “And so in those first weeks we settled into a routine. We scraped and cleaned and scrubbed the encroaching weeds, only to wake each day and do battle afresh. We focused our energies on the trailers escaping from the man-sized weeds: we hadn’t the energy or the tools to chop them down, and we merely sought to confine them to the upper deck. We did not despair; we were with each other, and for the time being we had what we needed for life. Might I say that for moments we were even happy?” This time she was sure that it was his voice that was catching; it was catching on her heart. She felt his regret, but even more, she felt his joy.

  “We were well into the second month when I made some unsettling discoveries. We were running low on supplies; four of the boxes I had taken to be filled with biscuit were instead filled with weeds. We had originally thought we would be able to live off the bounty of the land, but as we lived on our wreck, our unease around the weeds had converted into loathing. We would not eat that.

  “And always, I continued to search for a path that might lead us out of our fresh green hell. After yet another unsuccessful excursion, I returned to the ship one afternoon to discover my wife crouching on the upper deck. She was eating something, chewing like a dog on a bone. She started when she heard me and slyly threw it down. A creeping horror compelled me to chase after it. It was a piece of weed, apparently torn from the hand-like structure of the man-weed closest to the cabin. That weed was contorted as if in great pain, and it was missing what would have been a thumb—had it been a man.

  “My wife was sobbing. She swore that this was only the second time she had eaten it, that until yesterday she had felt only revulsion for the weeds, but yesterday her hunger overcame her and when a weed brushed her lips she was overpowered by the compulsion to devour it.

  “I assured her I understood her momentary weakness, and we pledged to each other to live from the ship’s biscuit for as long as it held out. We knew there might come a day when the weed would be the whole of our diet, but we vowed to delay that day for as long as we could.

  “It was the very next day that a weed brushed my lips as I passed. The taste was at once sweet and rotten. I had to taste it again and again. I licked my lips until not a trace of the flavor was left upon them. Then to my everlasting shame, I was overcome with a hunger that would not be denied. I ripped a limb off the weed I had tasted and gorged until my stomach ached. I think my wife guessed what happened to me that day, but she had the kindness and sympathy never to mention it to me. That is the lady she was, and is, even now . . .

  “A week or two passed, and we were becoming very much weakened by our small rations of ship’s biscuit and water. One morning, as the sun rose pale and heavy over the horizon, I noticed a small green sprout hidden by the hair that fell in front of her ears. The sprout sported a cotyledon, the embryonic ancestor of the first true leaves. I reached over to brush it from her face, but I knew, even as I was making the gesture, that the sprout would not be brushed, that it sprung from her face.

  “And so began our new life. Each morning, when we awoke, we examined each other and scoured and scrubbed each new outgrowth as it appeared. We were weak, and tired, and we knew we could not win. And yet, we meant to live, to spend whatever moments we still had, together, as man and wife.

  “We ran out of biscuit three days ago. I heard your bell and spied your lights and decided to take a chance on our old wreck’s dinghy and throw myself on your mercy. My wife and I had spent months patching and scrubbing it, but on previous voyage attempts the worn, unstable vessel leaked badly and prompted a quick return to shore. But this time, God’s mercy preceded yours, and the dinghy stayed afloat. It brought me to you and your kindness. But—where was his mercy before?”

  Her husband rejoined her on the bow, with a lantern to light his way. “No! No light, please!”

  Her husband quickly put the light down. “I’m sorry, I
didn’t mean any harm.”

  “I know. You are so kind. It’s just that—no light. Please.”

  “I’ve loaded up the raft with supplies. I can push it toward you with a boat hook. You might have to come closer, but not too near.”

  “I cannot thank you enough for what you are doing for her . . . for us. I am afraid she is dying, and I will soon be left alone. I am glad that she will die knowing that there are good people, good people who accept us for the man and woman . . . we were.”

  They were all three joined tightly together at that moment, a communion of absolute sorrow. They lowered the raft and pushed it off. They heard the rowing and the sound of the raft being intercepted by the voice in the night. “Thank you! Thank you so very very much—and God bless . . .”

  And as he rowed off, he fell into the path of the beam of their navigation light, a spectral green and leafy presence nodding with the effort of rowing, all to provide a final meal to his beloved verdant bride.

  Foreshadowing Carnacki:

  Algernon Blackwood’s “Smith:

  An Episode in a Lodging House”

  By Joseph Hinton

  The storyteller stands before the fire, regaling his friends with a tale of his adventure, which begins mysteriously enough, soon involves magic books and a circle of protection on the floor, and then rises to a climax of a deadly struggle against unearthly beings. He pauses occasionally in his narration to fiddle with his pipe, or just for dramatic effect. At one point, frustrated with the inadequacy of ordinary language to tell his story, he asks his listeners; “can you understand what I mean?”

  But no, this is not Carnacki in front of Dodgson and the others at 472 Cheyne Walk, but an unnamed physician in Edinburgh in Algernon Blackwood’s 1906 story “Smith: An Episode in a Lodging House,” from his first published volume, The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories. I have long wanted to write about this story simply because of the quintessential British understatement of the title. When I recently re-read “Smith” and Hodgson’s “The Hog,” inspired by my remembrance of the similar plot elements, I was also struck by many other similarities.

  Much artwork is a case of theme and variation, where ideas are borrowed from or suggested by other works of art, consciously or not. Certainly the detective series itself is borrowed from Arthur Conan Doyle, who probably developed the idea from Poe or somewhere else. But the coincidences between the Carnacki stories, especially “The Hog” and “Smith,” which is rather unique in Blackwood’s oeuvre, are remarkable. When you compare the setting, plot, main character, and use of magic (including ancient texts, protective circles, and an encounter with the ab-human), it suggests that Hodgson must have been inspired by the short story of Smith and his adventures in that Edinburgh lodging house in developing his Carnacki stories.

  Smith: An Episode in a Lodging House

  In the Blackwood tale the narrator begins without preamble, launching directly into the story:

  “When I was a medical student,” began the doctor, half turning towards his circle of listeners in the firelight, “I came across one or two very curious human beings; but there was one fellow I remember particularly, for he caused me the most vivid, and I think the most uncomfortable, emotions I have ever known . . .” (186)

  It was not a detective or medical case as such, but an encounter with a fellow lodger known only as Smith, a strange man who kept to himself and made unusual noises in his room at night. Smith asks the medical student at first for help pronouncing Hebrew words, then later borrows his “rare Rabbinical Treatise,” even knowing where to look for it on the bookshelf. Eventually, after repeated and increasingly mysterious encounters, it is plain to the reader that Smith is dabbling in Hebrew magic, perhaps raising spirits or demons. Smith also seems to be able to project his own conciousness or essence into the narrator’s presence. On other occasions it seems that our medical student is visited by other, stranger ethereal beings.

  Finally, one night Smith telepathically calls to the narrator for help. When the medical student arrives in his fellow lodger’s room he finds it filled with “a choking vapour” and “what seemed to be huge shadows passing in and out of the mist.” He then notices “a large circle drawn in black of some material that emitted a faint flowing light and was apparently smoking. Inside this circle, as well as at regular intervals outside it, were curious-looking designs, also traced in the same black, smoking substance” (209).

  The narrator detects the presence of beings, “living, intelligent entities” that “were from some other scheme of evolution altogether” (210). These beings were made up of vibrations of tremendous power, and the air was “full of these little vortices of whirring, rotating force, and whenever one of them pressed me too closely I felt as if the nerves in that particular portion of my body had been literally drawn out, absolutely depleted of vitality, and then immediately replaced—but replaced dead, flabby, useless” (211).

  Eventually, Smith is found cowering in a corner and asking for help to get back into the magic circle. When this is accomplished Smith, after much struggle and mortal peril, overcomes the beings he had evoked. There is no epilogue, or attempted explanation, but the doctor immediately wraps up his story and finishes with the dismissive “Smith still has my Rabbinical Treatise. At least he did not return it to me at the time, and I have not seen him since to ask for it” (217).

  The Hog

  The parallels to “The Hog” are probably obvious to readers of this journal, though the basic outline of Hodgson’s story is worth revisiting. Carnacki is, as usual, a psychic investigator, but in this case acting more as a doctor, trying to help a man named Bains who is afflicted by debilitating dreams of being pulled down into a deep realm of horror. The worst part, at least for Bains (and presumably Hodgson), is that this underworld is filled with swine-like grunting and squealing, even eliciting corresponding grunts from Bains himself. Carnacki sets up a magic ring of protection before conducting an experiment to find the source of Bains’s affliction.

  The protective circle is constructed according to hints and instructions from the ancient Sigsand Manuscript, which, among other things, specifies the magical properties of various colors. Carnacki’s electric vacuum tube circles pull the story in the direction of science fiction, with multiple tubes of different colors controlled by switches, and the experimenter and the victim clothed in rubber suits with electrodes connected to Bains’s head. A special ‘camera’ is used to make an audio recording of Bains’s visions. Inevitably, Bains accidentally falls asleep, making him vulnerable to the unearthly forces that are after him, and it all goes bad quickly for the experiment.

  The sleeping Bains becomes a gateway for the danger that soon emerges from within the protective circle. An other-dimensional shadow or hole appears in the center of the circle, and the room begins to fill with puffs of black smoke that eventually grow into a whirling wall of cloud, outside of the barrier. The sounds of grunting swine come up through the “hole” in the center of the room.

  Carnacki then spends many pages trying to protect Bains and at the same time block the intrusion of a gigantic snout from the growing pit, which Carnacki immediately recognizes as a creature described marvelously in the Sigsand Manuscript:

  “Ye Hogge which ye Almighty alone hath power upon. If in sleep or in ye hour of danger ye hear the voice of ye Hogge, cease ye to meddle. For Ye Hogge doth be of ye outer Monstrous Ones, nor shall any human come nigh him nor continue meddling when ye hear his voice, for in ye earlier life upon the world did the Hogge have power, and shall again in ye end . . . And I say unto all, if ye have brought this dire danger upon ye, have memory of ye cross, for of that sign hath ye Hogge a horror.” (221)

  Hodgson then shows his skill at long-form horror, as the struggle goes on and on. At times, Carnacki despairs and considers shooting first Bains, then himself, to avoid a worse fate. Finally, in a departure for Hodgson, salvation comes from above. To the sound of thunder, a dome of silent blue light appears, “G
od’s own colour . . . in awful majesty, like a living presence,” and “there had come to our aid one of those inscrutable forces which govern the spinning of the outer circle” (231).

  Setting, Plot, and Character

  Both of these stories are passed along to us, the readers, by one of the listeners in the room: an unnamed audience member in the Blackwood story, and the usual Dodgson relating the tale of Carnacki. Blackwood’s doctor commands the room and his circle of listeners to the flicker of firelight. He occasionally makes dramatic pauses, using the device of fiddling with his pipe, once causing one or two of his listeners to “glance over their shoulders into the dark distances of the big hall” (188) and another time to move in front of the fire so that no one could see the expression on his face.

  The Carnacki stories usually begin and end with the ritual of the pipe; with the listeners gathered in front of a cozy fire. Early on the doctor, telling his story in “Smith,” uses the phrase “if you can understand what I mean” (189), so familiar to readers of the Carnacki stories, though here he is only trying to describe the strangeness of Smith’s eyes, not an inexpressible encounter with supernatural beings. This rhetorical questioning of the audience is present in every Carnacki story, until in “The Hog,” which takes all the elements of a Carnacki story to extremes, a variation of that phrase is used twenty times.

  The plots, though, are somewhat reversed. Blackwood’s hero, the medical student, is the naïve one who nevertheless rescues Smith, who is dabbling with magic and the unknown. Carnacki, on the other hand, is the expert, using his knowledge and experience with magic to attempt to help the victim, Bains, though the plan goes awry and he must finally rescue Bains and himself.

  Blackwood’s narrator and Carnacki also have in common an interesting willingness to admit fear and uncertainty, as opposed to the arrogant self-confidence of Holmes and other detectives. It certainly enhances the feeling of danger when the narrator himself admits trepidation, as when Blackwood’s doctor says: “I am ashamed to this day of the pace at which I covered the flight of stairs in the darkness to the top floor, and of the shaking hand with which I lit my candles and bolted the door. But, there it is, just as it happened” (194)—and this is just an early encounter with a disembodied voice. Carnacki, too, often admits his discomfort: “I was shaking from head to foot with a feeling of extraordinary horror upon me” (209), though less so in “The Hog” than in what seem to be the earlier stories. Carnacki in “The Hog” is more confident, more sure of his scientific defenses, and more familiar with the outré forces he meets than in, for example, “The Thing Invisible,” where he admits that “I sat and sweated coldly (that’s the bald truth), with the ‘creep’ busy at my spine” (17). This phrase echoes remarkably the line from “Smith” just quoted.