The Remnant from the Deeps - FINALIST

[carnage_lee]

The Remnant from the Deeps

When, in 1852, the wreckage, myself included, was discovered by the vessels in the area, there were immediately printed many dramatic and sensational stories. Not only did the newspapers take part, but also at least one literary author of no small repute endeavored to recount the events which lead up to the wreck. Being the sole survivor, I was often interviewed for information. What I told them was as close to the truth as I dared-and I think enough so that the author, at least, may have deduced more. However, the most important parts of the story I did not, could not tell them. It was a different world back then, one closer to that of the narrow-minded Puritans. I do not believe that the entire world even today, and perhaps not in a hundred years, would be truly ready for even what part of the truth I know-in some ways its mind has narrowed further-but there shall come a day in the future when, whether it is ready or not, the world will have need to recognize stories like mine as the direst truth. Perhaps there may even be a few alive who will understand-similar stories have begun to be published; anyone who believed the narrative of Arthur Pym may be able to appreciate mine, and I have read fiction in magazines by a handful of New England authors who I think might also be receptive if I should be fortunate enough to have my work land in their hands. Regardless, it has been many years since the events of that day which started so calm and fair, and I was not starting in my youth then. Considering the dangers of my profession at the time, it is a wonder I survived long enough to retire to my Vermont farm in the first place, and my years of retirement have been long and perhaps pleasant enough to have dried off some of the strange fears in which I was immersed during my work upon the sea. I may live longer still, but I fear the onset of the mental infirmity that so often accompanies great age, and so, regardless of the world’s readiness, I shall give it my story, having waited to the latest date that I fear I can.

I first signed on as an able-bodied seaman to the whaling vessel in Nantucket. It being my first such voyage, although not my first experience on the seas, my inexperience lead me to receive the three-hundredth lay-that is, to agree to receiving, as payment, one three-hundredth of the profit of the whaling, from which my food and board aboard the vessel would be subtracted after the voyage. From the first, the voyage was ill omened. One crewman, a sturdy and experienced New Bedford mariner, was killed in an awkward accident, his body actually being flung far from the ship. His remains were never recovered onto the land, but instead were washed out to sea, where, for all I know, they still remain, his boned long gnawed by the many carrion-feeders that wait beneath the waves.

Upon reaching the open sea, I gained my first chance to truly take stock of my comrades. To my surprise, I found that civilized man was the minority on board the vessel. Savages, hired by the ship’s owners for their great skill at sea, were present from every continent. There were faces which had seen the peculiar stone ruins of the Congo by night, natives of America who had pow-wowed on our own continent, mysterious and weathered men who knew the frigid plateaus of Asia, and even a emigrant from those southern Pacific islands where the whaling-ships may stop for months yet never truly understand the local customs. The captain and mates, though, were all New Englanders, yet sometimes I sensed a lurking tension between them.

The captain himself was an odd fellow, given to strange hours and stranger behaviors. He was an old veteran of the whaling industry, and yet I think that his experience blinded him to some of the wonders and ways of sea. The course he set for the voyage was not unusual; we crossed the Atlantic, rounded Africa, and continue until we reached the South Sea, from which we headed for the Japanese whaling grounds. At first, it seemed as if the sight of the majestic waters and the fair weather had a benign effect on the captain, but ultimately his soul was too jaded to appreciate any wonder of this Earth-yet perhaps that may have turned out a blessing in the end.

After arriving in the South Sea, we encountered several other whaling vessels of varying nationalities. Each had troubling stories to tell-stories of strange whaling accidents that seemed worse than even the great danger natural to the trade. So great is the typical danger of whaling that it was easy to scorn the accidents as luck, yet they seemed to form a trend as if some malevolent and mysterious force was working to bring great harm to the whaling vessels, and a sailor is nothing if not superstitious. I think it may have been as a result of those that the dreams started.

My dreams have always been slightly more fantastic than those of my companions, but, like most men, I have never had much luck in recalling them. From the moment I began the whaling voyage, they seemed to grow more fantastic still, but I do not think that the change was significant until after we arrived in the South Seas. At first, all I could remember from my dreams was a sort of odd tread, like a man walking on the deck above my head yet with something in it that suggested it was not the two legs of man making such a sound. Over time, I began to recall more from my nights. I began to glimpse images of a dark and churning sea, one that seemed strangely different from the one I beheld by day. Perhaps-and it is truly impossible to say, for mankind has no experience applying such words to the sea-there was something newer, or younger, about the water-certainly there was no trace of the works of man, or any recognizable creature of the modern sea, save an occasional sound, coming from outside my mental perspective, that might or might not have been the splashings of a surfaced whale. As we drew closer to the Japanese whaling grounds, the dreams grew more intense. I seemed to see strange shapes in the waters, shapes that swam with an ease greater than and yet a style different than the swiftest fishes I have spied in waking hours. Their shapes, perhaps, were distorted by the troubled waters, yet there seemed something terribly unfamiliar in these creatures which I beheld in a sea so like and yet so unlike the one I had long known. I then began to receive a series of impressions of a face, yet the dreams of the face seemed somehow to be of a different set and sort than the dreams of the sea. It was a human face, entirely human, although foreign and swarthy, and marked by all that was sinister and evil in the life of man. Yet, despite this appearance, it often seemed much more welcome than those views of the sea, for just as the strength and size of the sea is so unfathomable to man, so do the evils of man pale in their limited scope before the secrets that the sea may hold.

Then came the fateful morning when first I believe our end could have been foreseen. We gave chase to a whale which had been but distantly glimpsed by the captain. We had already taken several whales, and so at first no more than the usual excitement motivated the crew. Perhaps the captain, with his eyes much keener than mind, saw something odd about the whale despite the distance, for he immediately seemed to develop a strange aspect. However, I had noticed it little, for I beheld, upon the deck, none other than the very face which I had beheld in my dreams, atop the body of a crewman I had never seen before. Perhaps it was merely his foreign ways, but there seemed something even more sinister about he man in person. He moved with a grace that was not pleasing to watch, and, although I am not sure for I rushed with the rest of the crew to begin the hunt, he seemed to cast no shadow in the morning sun.

As I rowed one of the whaleboats, I soon saw the whale much more closely, and immediately I could realize why the captain had acquired such a strange aspect. If it was a whale, a fact that I later had reason to doubt, than it was not quite like any other that I had ever seen. In addition to a general oddness of proportions and appearance, its great jaw was slanted or warped at an improbable angle, one which would have seemed a crippling disfigurement in any normal whale. However, the jaw seemed, not less, but doubly fearsome, as its angle seemed to be one unnatural not just in living flesh but in all that the eyes of man have beheld, and its function seemed not the least bit impaired. No sooner had the captain’s whaleboat, swifter than mine, reached the uncouth creature, than a single motion of that terrible jaw shattered it. I did not gain a truly close glimpse of the whale, yet before it vanished beneath the waves I did get close enough to seem to see further worrying features about it. The captain certainly seemed much affected when he was rescued from the wreckage of his boat, and I think that from then on a great deal of freedom left his figure, and he went about his last few days as if realizing that he had before him a task whose completion, trusted by fickle fate to him, was far more important than his own existence.

That night my dreams were more terrible still, as if the vision of the face upon the deck had increased my connection to it. So much greater was the connection that I believe I heard it begin to speak. The words were pronounced with anything but fluency, and the grammar was stranger still, which makes me wonder if it was entirely speech that I heard. Eve if it were just speech, I would be glad to forget it. The foreign face spoke of the eternities which the sea has beheld, and of the eternities which came long before mankind, long before even the seed of the tree of life to which mankind belongs was planted. It spoke of greater, darker seas between the stars, and hinted at the unspeakable things which may be found in their depths, and suggested that not just one but many horrors had descended over the aeons from the seas of space to the seas of the Earth. It spoke of elder races of beings which had used the seas as humanity had used the lands, only with far more mastery, for their mastery extended to the creation of the very creatures which populated their seas. It even, in one long and blasphemous sentence, hinted that such creatures might have something of an amorphous form, and hinted that, built for the ages, they might have outlasted the aeons after the fall of the elder races, though afflicted by lack of maintenance, and perhaps frozen in form-although who knew but that one day, when perhaps others arrived from beyond the stars or climates gave different signals or even of nothing else than their own volitions, these creatures might return to their most horrifying, powerful, and amorphous forms, and then perhaps alter the globe in unimaginable ways.

I awoke greatly troubled in the night. The next few days did little to relieve my nerves, as captain Ahab, as if driven mad by his close encounter with what I persist in labeling a whale for lack of the courage to think of what else it might have been, seemed determined to singly pursue and slay the uncanny leviathan. The strange foreigner seemed once to be killed in the hunt, yet I saw him again in my dreams, and I suspect that he may have been one of those ancient mystics who has seen so much of the universe that even death may be but a planned part of a greater strategy in a game known to few mortal men. I was forced to avert my eyes from the leviathan, for fear of seeing something in its form that should not have belonged in that of a whale. Certainly, its white color suggested that its flesh was different from that which I had so often seen dangling dead from the sides of the Pequod. As the chase proceeded, I found it difficult to tell which was the hunter and which was the hunted.

The final day dawned clear and fair. That day, all the whaleboats were destroyed by the rampaging leviathan, mine included. Ahab, in his monomania, had somehow managed to become fixed to the creature, and died striving to remove the monstrosity from the world of men. Jaded he was at all wonders of this Earth, but no man, I think, may resist those not of this Earth. I think perhaps some of the crew on board the Pequod may have realized at the last moment the sacrifice they had to attempt to make for the sake of humanity, and tried to use the most powerful weapon they had against the creature. Perhaps, though, it was the thing’s own viciousness that drove it towards the ship-all I know for certain is that the two collided, the Pequod was reduced to splinters, and the creature dove again, perhaps slain, yet I fear that no merely physical assault may ever permanently destroy it beyond recovery.

Not a single other crewmember survived the battle, and I myself would have died had not the Rachel, another whaling vessel searching for a lost man of its own, discovered me. Since then, I have done my utmost to forget the bizarre nightmares I experienced aboard the Pequod, both by day and night. Never, though, do I think I will be able to forget how, when my own whaleboat was destroyed and I was but inches from the flesh of the leviathan, I beheld that its white surface was not rough as a whales, yet terribly and fluidly smooth. And still, sometimes, do I cry out in the night when I recall the way that the amorphous flesh seemed, retreating from my own wrecked boat, too begin to shift into a form far more terrible than that of a mere white whale.

Yes, you’ll call me mad in my old age, but I saw what I saw as sure as I am called Ishmael. Others have glimpsed such things in equally or more remote and dangerous locations, and I think there were those who, even when first the story of the Pequod’s destruction was made known and I withheld my tongue on the more unsettling facts, suspected what might have actually occurred. The literary author, I think, figured much of it out for himself-after all, did not Mr. Melville write in his ironically-named The Whale that whaling ships “in the heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cooke with all his marines and muskets would not have willingly dared”? And did not Mr. Melville suggest, also, that Ahab had “been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales”?

Author’s Note: If the reader wishes to verify these quotes, they may look at the chapters “The Ship” and “The Advocate”.