“A penny in the pint—en
Off with you!
Cruel Cap’in fo’ a mum
En a randy ole salt afer ye bum!”
-Sailors’ Refrain
Upon the Poop Deck
The sweltering night was relieved by no cool sea breeze. The lamp-lit poop deck was inhabited by three shadows, shadows of the men they once where; before their naval service, before this accursed slave war on this accursed island, before the accursed yellow jack fever!
Aside from the officers in their stifling cabins below and a few of the heartier old salts like Pell Driscoll who swung in his sweaty hammock below without a care on this earth, these three were all that remained of the able-bodied hands on this watch. Of 300 men, officers and boys, only 30 remained able as the terrible bile disease carried off the rest one by bloody one!
They rode at anchor. Even so the tiller must be manned. Mister Pringle held the wheel, nodding off to sleep with each gentle swell that lifted the hull, and coming back to consciousness with each slap of wave that greeted the rocking timbers. He was a small fellow, pale, soft, and a mere 18 years, the junior officer boy of the entire lot.
Standing at attention was the burly marine Hal Thurmond, the only one of that lot that did not bugger the boys on board. He looked down over the slouched form of Mister Pringle into the weary eyes of Jay Prescott.
Just last winter, when running an errand for his mum, he had stopped in for a pint at the Sheaf Setter back in Liverpool. He had felt himself having a right fortunate day, the first pint of his young life out among working men since his father’s death in the yard. Then, after finishing his last gulp, he looked into his cup and saw a penny—the King’s Penny. A Royal naval officer stood by his shoulder, having dropped the dastard coin in Jay Prescott’s pint unbeknownst to the twelve-year-old boy.
Before Jay even knew what the fuss was about he was being dragged off to the awful tune of, “Off with ye now sprat!”
He recalled now, on this hellish night that was not far removed from his 13th birthday, that it was harsh Lieutenant Howe and cod-grasping Pell Driscoll who had dragged him from mum and country. He returned Hal Thurmond’s gaze with a reluctant smile. The man was the burliest fellow on board, a real bible reading Christian, and had protected Jay from the buggered fate that was normally the lot of a ship’s boy in His Majesty’s Royal Navy.
They both then looked to the moonlit mountains above the torch-lit coast where the savage maroons made their camps. A silent cloudburst had just abated and steam could be seen rising above the jungle-topped peaks, inviting to the cool-seeking sailor until he considered the man-eating maroons that lurked above, machete in hand, thirsting for the blood of whites.
The mild slapping of wave upon hull continued instead of giving long pause—and on their larboard side now. This light kiss of the wave seemed to submerge Mister Pringle beneath a blanket of sleep. This was nothing to mind. Jay and Hal would wake the Officer of the Watch if need be.
Jay looked down and considered the tin of grog and ladle at his feet; Mister Pringle’s own ration saved up to keep him awake at such times. Jay considered waking the officer and dousing his gums but there was little enough in the tin so he decided to ration the man so he would be nigh perky at dawn when the Captain mounted the poop.
The moon was midnight high above the open sea shining its light upon the mountains of mystery, their tiny wooden world bobbing between those two soaring elements of nature.
Midnight Low
They had all three fallen asleep to the larboard lapping of the wave—then it stopped precipitously, awakening them all to the slithering sound of what might have been an octopus sliding from a net down over the gunwale. The only light now came from the stern lantern, the moon having fallen behind the jungle mountain.
What slid forth over the gunwale might indeed have been an octopus, of a queer kind though, for if it were an octopus it had been assembled from a broken and bound man, a black slave man by appearance, recently from Africa, not some colored sort, but a night black maroon.
The broken figure was that of a small lean black man with a large round head, a pinched rat like face, big black glassy eyes and a big-toothed mouth too wide by half. His fingernails were black and pointy and shone like glass in the lantern light, and attached to hands every bit as large as those belonging to Hal Thurmond, who looked on in pity at the somehow still living heap of broken humanity that seemed to be trying to rise on a broken arm while it set a broken ankle with a hand that was itself flopping on a broken wrist!
Mister Pringle stood as if frozen in terror at this poor wretch, exhibiting that look Mum had had when news came that Father had been crushed between two masts at the shipyard. The obviously burned, cut and broken heap of torn flesh and broken bones screamed not in pain, and asked not for help, but seemed as if a senile old man were matter-of-factly trying to put his broken clock back together after dropping it from the mantle. The very animated head and face, with eyes darting this way and that, alternately regarded them with some deep need it seemed, only to return to the puzzle that was its own broken body with an impatient consternation, not with the panicked mortality of the recently maimed.
Hal Thurmond hissed in his night watch whisper, “Bless that poor bugger!”
Having set an ankle and now working on a wrist, the folded up little man looked up to Hal with a magnetic gleam in his eyes, and spoke, in the way that the Frenchy creoles do when they make a spicy soup of English, “Oh Big Boy? Bujjer me? No, bujjer he!”
With that the creature’s large black eyes of glassy night darted to Mister Pringle who stood holding the tiller, piss running down his breaches and over his shoes. The creature then winked at Jay Prescott with a kind inviting smile and lisped, “Flease boy, ring you to We.”
The creature then return with manic zeal to the setting of its broken bones, a wrist seemingly righted with a resounding pop.
Jay felt himself slinking reluctantly around the tiller, far around, for big burly Hal Thurmond was tugging down the pee-breaches of Mister Pringle, who cried with his eyes, and who grasped the wheel pins with such fury that his hands turned white, and…
Jay’s stomach flipped within his body at the sight of his protector doing to an officer what he had prevented Pell Driscoll from doing to him.
Would he be next?
Just to make sure that answer was 'no' Jay slid Hal’s boarding knife from its scabbard from where it lay about his feet, and continued around the buggered up tangle about the ship’s wheel as he heard Mister Pringle biting the tiller between sobs.
He was soon squatting over the tangled mess of an escaped slave man—more like cast of shark bait it appeared. Still the fellow continued tinkering with his own parts like a watchmaker at his workbench, fussing all the while. He set another ankle and then rose on two legs—one with a backward facing knee, and looked down at his work, and then back up to Jay, indicating a backwards foot, and a missing chunk from his calf where some sea creature had had its meal. “Oh My, We think this be a wee bit bad.”
The large eyes then grew kind, and in a mesmerizing fashion peered into Jay’s eyes with a deep inviting love. It then occurred to him that this man of undetermined age was of his own modest height.
“Be my saving boy, Jay—be My Papaloi!”
The pathetic creature, who now seemed such a sympathetic soul to a boy who had taken the King’s Penny, ran it’s wrist onto the point of the boarding knife as it stood broken legged before him, even using its other unnaturally long hand to steady Jay’s grip. After the blade had been run up and out of the scarred black arm the creature—no, he was certainly a man—pressed his spurting wrist to Jay’s mouth and intoned musically, to the brutal tackle block rhythm of Mister Pringle’s hideous fate, “Drink Me, drink me dry—never into the night cry. Come with We!”
It tasted like the iron filings that flew from the smith’s sharpening stone—but it was not the taste that mattered. Jay Prescott had never thought the world would understand. Now he knew with absolute thirst that The World did understand. It was people that failed to comprehend the Colony…
The Casement Pond
Phenyl had no idea how she came to be floating belly up in the casement pond at the base of the dome, now, for the first time in her life finding herself outside of Habitat Syra, in the realm of mutants, men and the horrors that had stalked the world since The Melting.
The sky, the meteor in the sky!
As she stood and waded over to the weed-choked rim of the pond she traced the skyline with her clear roving eyes—which she felt should have been so clouded after the nightmares she had experienced—for the cloudbank she remembered puffed along the horizon above which the thing had been seen plummeting out of the heavens.
Over there; north; the rising sun on the right. Head off in that direction.
I am pregnant! I cannot return—and might be hunted by the males.
Phenyl peeled off her suit, realizing that if it interacted with the habitat array then it could be used to track her. In nothing but her thigh to neck body sheathe and with no protection for her feet, thankfully calloused on the treadmill, she jogged off gingerly, intent on avoiding injury to her feet, which were the only survival tools that would be relevant to escaping her erasure in the short term.
What of the little man?
That was a dream, girl. Locate the crash site. If that is a lunar craft there will be equipment We might be able to salvage.
We? Where in the world did that come from?
You must be losing your mind worrying about the baby. Of course, the baby—we are a we now, aren’t we?
Damn...
Jeannot is turning..dare I say it..into an avenging superhero/vigilante!
The historic Jeannot did come off as a devilish voodoo version of an avenger in the fragmentary quote of his by Stoddard. I think of him as a cross between Modred, Dracula and The Thing. I really got the impression in reading Stoker that he was reaching for a way to express racial memory through blood magic. Howard, Burroughs and leading thinkers of the early 20th Century seriously considered the possibility of blood acting as a kind of 'racial black box' that might be mined by both science and literary figures.
Winter also explores this concept from a more Howardesque angle, with Jeannot being my vehicle for exploring the Stoker angle.