Part 1 of something I've been working on
Posted: Fri May 26, 2006 6:04 pm
I'm not too sure how to take it from here, but I have a few ideas in mind. If anyone has it sussed from what's here, PM me and see if you've any ideas to help wrap it up. I have the final section done, just need the middle bit.
The Horror in Silent Water
“They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,
Nor spake, nor moved their eyes
It had been strange, even in a dream
To have seen those dead men rise.”
- Samuel Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
I - De Profundis
Captain’s Log
Passage of the “Fenrisulfr”
Norway to Jamaica
January 1st, 1900
At the dawn of a new year, heralding in turn the beginning of a new century, I find myself once again treading the razor’s edge, and my boots are wearing thin at the soles. While there is no ecstasy to rival that of initially setting sail on a freshly-laden, beautifully ornate ship, with the promise of new lands to set foot upon; there is also no horror to compare with that of a vessel halfway across the ocean, with no land for leagues around. Madness and murder can take their unhinging grip upon even the most pragmatic and dour of men when all that is to be seen is a trackless, endless expanse of undulating blue ether, and all that is to be heard is the wild screaming of circling gulls.
I have seen it happen before, and should I die some day a judged sinner, Hell’s wrath shall hold no terror in my heart quite akin to that inspired by the last voyage this great ship Fenrisulfr undertook. Not yet the captain, I was lucky, as the treacherous dogs onboard, perhaps driven by a sea more treasonous than themselves, rioted and rebelled, flaying the captain and both his mates alive, and dangling their still paroxysmal bodies from the starboard cannon while their dying screams still resounded around the ghosted timbers. Though not a part of their successful - well, victorious - dissent, I was placed in charge of the ship, perhaps because I was the most experienced sailor amongst them, but in all likelihood, it was due to the fact that they knew that after witnessing what they were capable of, I was in no position to refuse or to hand them over to the authorities upon reaching land once again. The official explanation given for the absence of the captain and his first and second mates was a simple case of piracy, with the corsairs thwarted by the selfless sacrifice of the missing trio in taking the fight to the insurgents’ ship. It was the least I could do, to have the legacy of the man who taught me my trade and craft preserved by a glorious death. I only pray to God that I do not incur a similar fate myself.
I hope that the presence of the passenger we have on board, a muscular Danish man, should defuse any feelings of resentment. Though he seems harmless and willingly paid for his passage with us to the colonies of Jamaica, many of the crew seem to shy away from him, almost as if in fear. I must admit that his imposing stature and the tinge of grey running through his roughly-hewn face is unnerving, but there are others among the crew with a stonier appearance, and it does not disconcert me as much as it does the others.
January 2nd
The crew seem eerily silent and sullen. I do not know why, but there has scarcely been a word uttered since we left the harbour. The last vestiges of land on the horizon are slowly but surely disappearing; and I think that they are beginning to realise that this journey might indeed turn out to be like their last one. I just pray to God that those miserable jotun do not treat me as they did Captain Magnus, young Kurt and the resolute Johannes. O, how the fear in the eyes of that iron-willed Prussian haunts me!
The water around us is getting clearer, free from the taint of a city’s waste. It is hard to believe its depth is as great as it is, for when looking out this morning I could have sworn that I could see the very bottom, though it is more likely that some ancient plateau lies beneath us, far from the ocean bed, fooling me as to the profundity below us. What alarmed me were the signs of wreckage strewn about this surface, be it bed or upland. Scant though it was, I could discern a few recognisably curved pieces of timber, a wrought-iron figurehead, and a remarkably intact set of oilskins. I just hope that the ship that this detritus once constituted was sunk of its own accord, a faulty hull or too much weight proving its downfall. The last thing I wish to think about is the waiting jaws of rocks hungry for mariners’ blood. Perhaps Claude, the young Frenchman, will play a song or two on his flute if I ask them. It may rouse the spirits of the others and should serve to keep my mind off of more perturbing matters.
January 3rd
Something strange has happened this morning. I was woken from my sleep by the frantic yelling of one of the crew, and hurried to see what the source of this havoc could be. Arriving, rather bathetically, last of all, I saw that it was Bjorn who had been calling. I was quickly informed that he had thought there had been a man falling overboard, for he had seen a figure swimming around the ship. As he called, however, for assistance, the swimmer stopped, laying face down in the water - dead. As I pushed through the rest of the crew to see this drowned man, I felt an iron grip upon my shoulder, and turned to face Fresleven, the daunting Danish passenger. His words struck me as odd, yet I ignored them at the time -
“It is dead. There is no use in hauling it onto the ship, and it is worse for us to have it aboard. Let it lie, he is a child of Iormungand now.”
Not heeding this cryptic warning, I turned away from him and continued towards the side of the ship, wondering what was meant by “child of Iormungand”. What did the Midgard Serpent of old myth have to do with anything?
I ordered one of the boats to be lowered, and a man with a boat-hook to bring the corpse on board the ship. As he drew the cadaver towards his small craft, there was a quickly stifled cry of horror, which doubled the speed with which we drew the boat back up again. As we dragged the sodden body onto the deck, the cause for such shock became apparent. The figure we had drawn aboard was a man, there was no doubt about that, but where there had once been a head, there now lay only a tangled mass of seaweed and shells, grotesquely arranged by the capricious quirks of nature to look like a mocking face. As my gaze met that of the glossy black mussel eyes, I recalled the first three words of Fresleven’s attempt to dissuade us from bringing the body onto the ship. “It is dead.” Not ‘he’ - Fresleven seemed quite definite in his choice of words. As I looked around for his face in amongst the crew, I could not see it; those more pressing matters were at hand. I gave orders to find everyone on the ship and ensure they were all accounted for. I did not recognise the dead man’s clothes, least of all his distinctive hob-nailed boots, buckled at their sides by a clasp engraved with the rune of the Great Snake - Jormungandr, or Iormungand as Fresleven has said. As I stared at the ouroboros devouring its own tail, I could not help by draw a parallel with my crew, who had, in a way, devoured a part of themselves when they mutinied. Was this what the implacable Dane had meant by “child of Iormungand”? Did he know the dark secret this ship and her crew hold?
January 3rd, continued
All the crew have been acounted for - we have not lost anyone. The body we hauled on board this morning, then, must be that of one who has been at sea for some time now before us - perhaps a survivor of the wreck I had noticed yesterday. Despite what Bjorn says, I believe this man was dead long before we discovered him. Old Bjorn is descended from those fools in the old days who had enough faith, or perhaps gall, to claim they were the mortal children of the old gods; and he is, as a direct consequence, I think, taken to flights of fancy and possessed of a wild imagination. He claims to have seen this carcass swimming a circuit of our vessel before stopping, but as I think about it, I believe the wake of our passing may have pulled the dead man about in the water, his lifeless arms flailing in a manner resembling swimming, leaving Bjorn’s troubled mind to fill in any blanks in his own rhapsodical way. I imagine the poor fellow must have been fightened out of his wits when he saw the man’s sea-born face.
The nature of that phenomenon still disturbs me. Were the motley assortment of seaweed and barnacles affixed to the stump of his neck not arranged in any manner, I would have taken it simply as proof that the body had been at sea for a great many days, and no more thought would have been given to the matter. However, the peculiar and unnerving manner on which the sea’s bounty was arrayed had been taken as a dire omen by the rest of the crew, it mocking, eerily human semi-face seen as a benthic Death’s Head. Immediately that I realised the effect it was having upon my men, I hacked it off, with surprising difficulty, and threw the entire clump of kelp, barnacles and mussels overboard. The rest of the body is in the hold, covered in a thick sheet of canvas meant for any repairs to the sails. It should probably be thrown back into the ocean, but Bjorn and most of the others do not wish to see it in the water again, lest it be seen to swim once more. It shall stay where it is for the time being, as it is too wet to burn, and I do not want to risk having a funeral pyre on the ship anyway. We appear to be a day ahead of our expected time, having entered that expanse of ocean where no land is visible from any direction, and so I may use the time to call into the next port that should present itself so that I may dispose of it on land. I do not like the idea of continuing too long on this voyage with a crew as spooked and unnerved as they are.
Janurary 5th
Disaster, wrack, ruin and calamity! Lars, our navigator - and my own second mate - has perished. He was found yesterday morning by Fresleven, the Danish passenger, when it became apparent that he was not answering the call to rise of the day. His thraot was cut, deeply and uniformly, and was still tacitly dripping its sanguine horror into the growing pool of viscous liquid under his bunk.
Not wanting to panic the crew, I pronounced it a suicide, driven by the isolation at sea, and the horrors of the previous day. What I neglected to mention was the absence of the blade used to make the fatal wound, or - something pointed out to me by Fresleven - that the cut was of a uniform depth, and appeared quite ragged at the edges, which he informed me was a definite hallmark of murder. Privately, in my cabin, he explained to me that he had been a detective in Denmark years before, and knew that a suicidal person will tend to pull their head back, and the stretched skin of the throat will be cut cleanly - with the cut becoming shallower as it finishes. I listened, spellbound - wondering what depths of the criminal mind science will next liberate from the darkness of ignorance. Someone, he calmly proclaimed to me, had murdered Lars, in cold blood and over colder waters.
After my own design, the crew have been moved to the holds, and all of us shall be sleeping together, with myself and Fresleven taking turns to oversee things. I don’t know why I trust this brooding Dane, for he could easily be lying to me, or trying to divert suspicion from himself, but my guy tells me he is not the murderer - and a captain in my position trusts his instincts more than his men. The cramped and crowded conditions should prove enough of a deterrent to stall the murderer until we can deduce who it is - and I personally shall see him quartered and hung from the prow. The twice-treacherous bastard sall be caught, or may God have mercy on my soul, I shall drown each and every one of these mutinous whelps. The fact that they seem so cowed with fear will only help me.
The Horror in Silent Water
“They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,
Nor spake, nor moved their eyes
It had been strange, even in a dream
To have seen those dead men rise.”
- Samuel Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
I - De Profundis
Captain’s Log
Passage of the “Fenrisulfr”
Norway to Jamaica
January 1st, 1900
At the dawn of a new year, heralding in turn the beginning of a new century, I find myself once again treading the razor’s edge, and my boots are wearing thin at the soles. While there is no ecstasy to rival that of initially setting sail on a freshly-laden, beautifully ornate ship, with the promise of new lands to set foot upon; there is also no horror to compare with that of a vessel halfway across the ocean, with no land for leagues around. Madness and murder can take their unhinging grip upon even the most pragmatic and dour of men when all that is to be seen is a trackless, endless expanse of undulating blue ether, and all that is to be heard is the wild screaming of circling gulls.
I have seen it happen before, and should I die some day a judged sinner, Hell’s wrath shall hold no terror in my heart quite akin to that inspired by the last voyage this great ship Fenrisulfr undertook. Not yet the captain, I was lucky, as the treacherous dogs onboard, perhaps driven by a sea more treasonous than themselves, rioted and rebelled, flaying the captain and both his mates alive, and dangling their still paroxysmal bodies from the starboard cannon while their dying screams still resounded around the ghosted timbers. Though not a part of their successful - well, victorious - dissent, I was placed in charge of the ship, perhaps because I was the most experienced sailor amongst them, but in all likelihood, it was due to the fact that they knew that after witnessing what they were capable of, I was in no position to refuse or to hand them over to the authorities upon reaching land once again. The official explanation given for the absence of the captain and his first and second mates was a simple case of piracy, with the corsairs thwarted by the selfless sacrifice of the missing trio in taking the fight to the insurgents’ ship. It was the least I could do, to have the legacy of the man who taught me my trade and craft preserved by a glorious death. I only pray to God that I do not incur a similar fate myself.
I hope that the presence of the passenger we have on board, a muscular Danish man, should defuse any feelings of resentment. Though he seems harmless and willingly paid for his passage with us to the colonies of Jamaica, many of the crew seem to shy away from him, almost as if in fear. I must admit that his imposing stature and the tinge of grey running through his roughly-hewn face is unnerving, but there are others among the crew with a stonier appearance, and it does not disconcert me as much as it does the others.
January 2nd
The crew seem eerily silent and sullen. I do not know why, but there has scarcely been a word uttered since we left the harbour. The last vestiges of land on the horizon are slowly but surely disappearing; and I think that they are beginning to realise that this journey might indeed turn out to be like their last one. I just pray to God that those miserable jotun do not treat me as they did Captain Magnus, young Kurt and the resolute Johannes. O, how the fear in the eyes of that iron-willed Prussian haunts me!
The water around us is getting clearer, free from the taint of a city’s waste. It is hard to believe its depth is as great as it is, for when looking out this morning I could have sworn that I could see the very bottom, though it is more likely that some ancient plateau lies beneath us, far from the ocean bed, fooling me as to the profundity below us. What alarmed me were the signs of wreckage strewn about this surface, be it bed or upland. Scant though it was, I could discern a few recognisably curved pieces of timber, a wrought-iron figurehead, and a remarkably intact set of oilskins. I just hope that the ship that this detritus once constituted was sunk of its own accord, a faulty hull or too much weight proving its downfall. The last thing I wish to think about is the waiting jaws of rocks hungry for mariners’ blood. Perhaps Claude, the young Frenchman, will play a song or two on his flute if I ask them. It may rouse the spirits of the others and should serve to keep my mind off of more perturbing matters.
January 3rd
Something strange has happened this morning. I was woken from my sleep by the frantic yelling of one of the crew, and hurried to see what the source of this havoc could be. Arriving, rather bathetically, last of all, I saw that it was Bjorn who had been calling. I was quickly informed that he had thought there had been a man falling overboard, for he had seen a figure swimming around the ship. As he called, however, for assistance, the swimmer stopped, laying face down in the water - dead. As I pushed through the rest of the crew to see this drowned man, I felt an iron grip upon my shoulder, and turned to face Fresleven, the daunting Danish passenger. His words struck me as odd, yet I ignored them at the time -
“It is dead. There is no use in hauling it onto the ship, and it is worse for us to have it aboard. Let it lie, he is a child of Iormungand now.”
Not heeding this cryptic warning, I turned away from him and continued towards the side of the ship, wondering what was meant by “child of Iormungand”. What did the Midgard Serpent of old myth have to do with anything?
I ordered one of the boats to be lowered, and a man with a boat-hook to bring the corpse on board the ship. As he drew the cadaver towards his small craft, there was a quickly stifled cry of horror, which doubled the speed with which we drew the boat back up again. As we dragged the sodden body onto the deck, the cause for such shock became apparent. The figure we had drawn aboard was a man, there was no doubt about that, but where there had once been a head, there now lay only a tangled mass of seaweed and shells, grotesquely arranged by the capricious quirks of nature to look like a mocking face. As my gaze met that of the glossy black mussel eyes, I recalled the first three words of Fresleven’s attempt to dissuade us from bringing the body onto the ship. “It is dead.” Not ‘he’ - Fresleven seemed quite definite in his choice of words. As I looked around for his face in amongst the crew, I could not see it; those more pressing matters were at hand. I gave orders to find everyone on the ship and ensure they were all accounted for. I did not recognise the dead man’s clothes, least of all his distinctive hob-nailed boots, buckled at their sides by a clasp engraved with the rune of the Great Snake - Jormungandr, or Iormungand as Fresleven has said. As I stared at the ouroboros devouring its own tail, I could not help by draw a parallel with my crew, who had, in a way, devoured a part of themselves when they mutinied. Was this what the implacable Dane had meant by “child of Iormungand”? Did he know the dark secret this ship and her crew hold?
January 3rd, continued
All the crew have been acounted for - we have not lost anyone. The body we hauled on board this morning, then, must be that of one who has been at sea for some time now before us - perhaps a survivor of the wreck I had noticed yesterday. Despite what Bjorn says, I believe this man was dead long before we discovered him. Old Bjorn is descended from those fools in the old days who had enough faith, or perhaps gall, to claim they were the mortal children of the old gods; and he is, as a direct consequence, I think, taken to flights of fancy and possessed of a wild imagination. He claims to have seen this carcass swimming a circuit of our vessel before stopping, but as I think about it, I believe the wake of our passing may have pulled the dead man about in the water, his lifeless arms flailing in a manner resembling swimming, leaving Bjorn’s troubled mind to fill in any blanks in his own rhapsodical way. I imagine the poor fellow must have been fightened out of his wits when he saw the man’s sea-born face.
The nature of that phenomenon still disturbs me. Were the motley assortment of seaweed and barnacles affixed to the stump of his neck not arranged in any manner, I would have taken it simply as proof that the body had been at sea for a great many days, and no more thought would have been given to the matter. However, the peculiar and unnerving manner on which the sea’s bounty was arrayed had been taken as a dire omen by the rest of the crew, it mocking, eerily human semi-face seen as a benthic Death’s Head. Immediately that I realised the effect it was having upon my men, I hacked it off, with surprising difficulty, and threw the entire clump of kelp, barnacles and mussels overboard. The rest of the body is in the hold, covered in a thick sheet of canvas meant for any repairs to the sails. It should probably be thrown back into the ocean, but Bjorn and most of the others do not wish to see it in the water again, lest it be seen to swim once more. It shall stay where it is for the time being, as it is too wet to burn, and I do not want to risk having a funeral pyre on the ship anyway. We appear to be a day ahead of our expected time, having entered that expanse of ocean where no land is visible from any direction, and so I may use the time to call into the next port that should present itself so that I may dispose of it on land. I do not like the idea of continuing too long on this voyage with a crew as spooked and unnerved as they are.
Janurary 5th
Disaster, wrack, ruin and calamity! Lars, our navigator - and my own second mate - has perished. He was found yesterday morning by Fresleven, the Danish passenger, when it became apparent that he was not answering the call to rise of the day. His thraot was cut, deeply and uniformly, and was still tacitly dripping its sanguine horror into the growing pool of viscous liquid under his bunk.
Not wanting to panic the crew, I pronounced it a suicide, driven by the isolation at sea, and the horrors of the previous day. What I neglected to mention was the absence of the blade used to make the fatal wound, or - something pointed out to me by Fresleven - that the cut was of a uniform depth, and appeared quite ragged at the edges, which he informed me was a definite hallmark of murder. Privately, in my cabin, he explained to me that he had been a detective in Denmark years before, and knew that a suicidal person will tend to pull their head back, and the stretched skin of the throat will be cut cleanly - with the cut becoming shallower as it finishes. I listened, spellbound - wondering what depths of the criminal mind science will next liberate from the darkness of ignorance. Someone, he calmly proclaimed to me, had murdered Lars, in cold blood and over colder waters.
After my own design, the crew have been moved to the holds, and all of us shall be sleeping together, with myself and Fresleven taking turns to oversee things. I don’t know why I trust this brooding Dane, for he could easily be lying to me, or trying to divert suspicion from himself, but my guy tells me he is not the murderer - and a captain in my position trusts his instincts more than his men. The cramped and crowded conditions should prove enough of a deterrent to stall the murderer until we can deduce who it is - and I personally shall see him quartered and hung from the prow. The twice-treacherous bastard sall be caught, or may God have mercy on my soul, I shall drown each and every one of these mutinous whelps. The fact that they seem so cowed with fear will only help me.
