Tales from the Grey Void

As Cruikshank hobbled into the room, it seemed as though the whole world were holding its collective breath. I felt an icy shiver run down my spine, for I knew the moods to which Harvey was given of old—I would not go so far as to call him paranoid, for it was no bad thing for a captain to be wary of their crew, but in recent months, there was no denying that he now stood upon the border of that particular psychosis, like a psychic refugee, weighing their options before seeking asylum in a land at once foreign and yet in perfect harmony with their sensibilities.

“To what do we owe this pleasure,” said Stirling.

The question was not entirely devoid of sincerity, but the manner in which it had been delivered was tinged with an unmistakable sarcasm. Cruikshank ignored it, however—a red flag, if ever there was one.

“What are you doing colluding down here?” he said instead.

“Colluding?” I said, jocose in my feeble attempt to diffuse the situation. “For us to be colluding, we would have to like and trust one another—that you assume I would deign to trust a man as untrustworthy as Pitt Talbot here is an insult to my character, Captain.”

Pitt smiled bashfully. His hand, which rested upon the table beside his hoarded scrimshaw twitched slightly and I wished more than anything that he would pick up the length of pipe, with its delicate etching of the Prometheus, and offer it up to the captain, to distract him for but a moment from the warpath he now walked upon. He did no such thing, but seemed instead to shrink back, into himself, looking for all the world like a tortoise that has been surprised at breakfast by a wandering band of ecologists.

“I ask you again; what truth is it that you would hear from this mouth of mine?” said Cruikshank, glancing at me, but addressing the room at large.

I knew he would not be dissuaded or turned aside in his headlong charge into a confrontation—he was no bull, to be led by the nose or tricked by the flapping of a red rag, instead, he was a prowling leopard, who, having spotted suitable prey, stalks it tirelessly through the jungle to its bloody end.

“The nature of this voyage,” said Stirling, coolly. “Its purpose and its ends.”

“You believe I have been untruthful in that regard?” said Cruikshank, turning at once to face Stirling, identifying him instantly as the only willing interlocutor in the room—the cat had spotted its mouse.

“I know you have,” said Stirling. “Bart here has said as much.”

Now the roving eyes of Cruikshank landed on me and it was all I could do not to shrink back from their glare, as if a hot coal had landed in my lap and I had no choice but to bear it as it burned a hole in my trousers.

“Is this true, Bartleby?” he said.

I sighed—there was no choice now but to throw myself into the mêlée and pray the leopard didn’t eat my face before I landed the killing blow.

“It is,” I said. “The crew needs to know. The mates need to know.”

“And I told you they would,” Cruikshank snapped. “I told you I would tell them on my terms. My terms, not those of Bartleby S. Criven!”

“When? When did you plan to tell them?” I said. “When we were already on the trail? When we were cruising at 15,000 feet? When they had no choice but to follow you or mutiny?”

“Mutiny?! Damn you Bart but I will not have that accursed word uttered in my presence!”

“That is the choice you would have given them—I say it only in counsel, not as a threat,” I said, patiently. “I know what it is that you plan and yet I am here, am I not? Have I turned aside or fled?”

“You have conspired here with these two,” said Cruikshank, but his voice wavered as he spoke—his words were not to convince me, nor Stirling nor Pitt, but himself. “You have conspired to force my hand.”

“Then let it be forced,” said Stirling. “Out with it, Harvey, out with it and be done. Bart is right—you cannot force this choice on us when there is no alternative but to meekly follow you to whatever doom it is you have planned for yourself.”

“Doom, is it?” said Cruikshank, and his face which had grown hard and gnarled with anger now seemed to sag—a sorrow, pitiful and heavy, withered his features until he seemed prematurely aged by it, as though this word alone had added two decades to his count. “Yes, I suppose it is—doom, fate, wyrd, call it what you will, it is mine to be sure, though I did not choose it, Stirling.”

Sighing, he stumped over to a chair beneath one of the cabin’s portholes and sat down.

Outside, the afternoon sky was a flat expanse of pale orange, washed with cloud. I thought for a moment of Claude and Hailey, and wondered where they were, before Cruikshank started to speak once more.

“It is true, I have not been entirely honest with you all,” he said. “The nature of this voyage… It is a hunt, certainly, but a hunt of a different kind to that advertised. I intend to go after it.”

Stirling shook his head bitterly.

“A fool’s errand,” he said. “To avenge yourself on a mere object. You would stub your toe and smash the offending article of furniture to matchsticks, is that it?”

“A stubbed toe?” said Cruikshank, and so saying, he lifted his bionic leg. “Behold, my stubbed toe, Stirling—the ache is still in her, though there is no meat there to scratch or sooth. Aye, I would have my revenge, but it is you that are the fool if you mistake our quarry for mere objects, as you put it. There is an intellect in them, though from whence it came, I know not.”

“I want no part in this madness,” said Stirling.

“Have I ever told you the story of how I got this leg of mine, Stirling?” said Cruikshank, ignoring Stirling’s objection.

“I know it,” said Stirling.

“But have you ever heard it from me?” said Cruikshank. “I have no doubt you know its shape—its characters and its setting—for these are all common knowledge, but have you ever truly heard my version of the tale?”

Stirling shook his head once more, shifting awkwardly where he stood, as if he wished to flee from a room containing a dangerous animal but knew such sudden movements as would be required to effect his escape might also result in his being leapt upon and torn apart.

“I won’t bore you with the pre-amble,” said Cruikshank, leaning back in his chair. “Suffice to say, we were high above the Hebrides, a mile or so north of the Isle of Canna, tracking a great flood from over the North Sea—one of the last to come out of those parts. We had put out the boats late—for the flood was fast-moving and we did not wish to end up in a muddle, chasing and putting out only for the bastards to run to windward again and elude us. The Uranus was in close for that reason—too close, as I now know.

“I took to my boat—the Oberon—with dear old Ant Wilson and Neil Craddock—Second String Craddock, they called him, on account of Ant’s prowess with a harpoon, though he was a fair shot in his own right. As soon as we headed out, we were right in the midst of it all—the very heart of the flood. It was all Robbie Felton could do to keep us from being stoved-in or burst—a damn good pilot, he was. Damn good.

“It was in the very eye of the flood that I saw her—the Black Beauty, though she was more beast than beauty, as I discovered. Enormous she was—she must have fled a penthouse suite, or perhaps some grand old manor somewhere—and made of polished ebony. A great void in the sky, like a black hole in motion, she seemed, and I knew she was my prize—I would take that tub or I would die, I thought.”

Cruikshank laughed bitterly, shaking his head at the folly of his past self.

“That neither came to pass is truly a vicious jest—someone or something must have heard those words in my head and decided to thwart me, there can be no other explanation.

“We closed on her fast, for the Oberon was the fleetest boat we had and Robbie was a canny pilot. She was a flighty creature, darting hither and thither like a swift on the wing—a tricky target and no mistake. I brought Ant up to the prow alone—no disrespect to Craddock, of course, but the poor man wouldn’t have made that shot had he had a thousand harpoons and all the time in the world. Ant took his stance and waited—I only realised after the fact that he was waiting for her to enter his sights—that was Ant in a nutshell; accurate he may have been, but he had brains to match and he knew there was no way to lead a target like that; better to post up and let the target come to him, if you take my meaning? Two, three, four passes the Black Beauty made across the prow of the Oberon, then out comes Ant’s harpoon, flashing like a chameleon’s tongue, crossing the space between us in an instant. His stick found its mark, caught tight in her pipework—beautiful plumbing, the colour of old gold, like an Egyptian tomb, it was, like she was the tub of Cleopatra herself.”

Cruikshank paused—having come to the crucial moment of his story, he seemed now to toil under a hidden weight, like a poorly balanced clock whose hands struggle to ascend the hours between six and twelve.

“I have done this job long enough to have heard all the stories there are about the behaviour of tubs and sinks—terrible stories, of stoved boats and of the sky raining the bodies of their occupants, of fishers crushed and broken by their catches, or torn from their moorings to drift the skyward sea until the strength of their arms fails, or the air grows too thin to breathe—but never in my life had I encountered such things for myself, nor have I felt the malice behind such actions.

“She turned on us then, instantly, without a second thought, and that alone I knew to be unheard of—in all those tragic tails, the turning of the tub came only after a long and hard chase, only after the sleigh-ride had run for miles or more and the catch could conceive of no other option than violence.

“Robbie Felton was the first to react—that man had excellent instincts, as you might expect from a pilot of his reputation—but it was not enough. He turned us away from her path, but she caught the Oberon a glancing blow all the same, dashed in the starboard hull and spilled Craddock, Choudhury and Peterson to their graves. Passing a little way beyond us, she turned swiftly and charged again, aiming for our stern. Robbie had a splinter like a walrus tooth sticking out of his shoulder and I can only assume it was this wound that foiled his keen hands, for he could not seem to get the tiller around in time to dodge. Choudhury had been our fireman and without her, we had no way of rapidly ascending. I was closest to the burner and so I leapt on its chain and hauled down. It was this that saved me, if you feel inclined to say I was saved at all. The Oberon rose maybe six feet, but the Black Beauty rose up with us and stove the boat to splinters. Down went Ant Wilson and Robbie Felton. There I remained, clinging to the burner’s chain, entangled in the balloon’s cables like a wasp in a spider’s web.

“I thought that might be the end of it, but I was wrong, for the tow-line was still attached by a fragment of prow. The Black Beauty stopped, some way away and turned to face me—I was spiralling on the chain, turning round and round and catching only glimpses of this terrible beast, who, out of spite, now taunted me. I thought she would charge me and dash my brains from my head as she had dashed my crew from my boat, but I was wrong about that too. Instead, she flew circuits around me, fast as any hawk, and with each pass, the tow-line grew tighter around my legs—tighter and tighter it grew, until I could feel my bones popping from their sockets like corn kernels in a frying-pan—the pain, good god, the pain still makes me shudder, but that was not the worst of it. Tighter the tow-line grew until I could no longer feel the pain in my legs, until I could no longer feel anything in my legs at all, only the numb weight of them beneath me. Then, at last, the tow-line snapped. I was barely conscious by then, but I remember watching, as if in a dream, as that black beast went from boat to boat, stoving each to matchsticks—the Miranda, the Ariel, the Umbriel and the Titania, all gone, crews spilled to the open air, screaming all the way down. The last thing I recall, before the darkness took me, was the Black Beauty speeding towards the Uranus—the void-formed bullet of her bulk bearing down on its envelope, to burst it asunder and so scuttle my ship and all I had plundered from the trove of the sky. Her trove, as I now think of it, for there can be no doubt that she is an empress of her kind—their leader, if you can conceive of such a thing.

“When I awoke, it was with this accursed appendage,” said Cruikshank, tapping his bionic leg—with the conclusion of his tale, he had seemed on the verge of tears, but it was as though by merely touching the memento of this tragic incident, sorrow was sublimated into anger; a dark fetish or charm that needed only the contact of his skin to perform its magic. “This stubbed toe, woven into my flesh, and my other leg wrapped in plaster.”

We stood in silence, as if in mourning, for we each knew at least one hunter who had lost their life in the sinking of the Uranus.

At long last, Stirling broke the silence—though he had awaited the end of Cruikshank’s tale patiently, his frustration could be denied no longer.

“But how do you know it’s still out there?” he said. “How do you know this Black Beauty of yours hasn’t been caught by some other hunter?”

“I feel it, in the leg she stole from me—it’s phantom yearns for revenge, aches for it, and it will not rest until the beast has been plugged, by my hand or anyone else’s for that matter.”

Stirling shook his head one last time and made for the door. As he passed me, I caught him by the arm and stared meaningfully into his eyes.

“Do not ask me to do this, Bart,” he said, turning away from my stare. “Throw your own life away, if you value it so little, but do not ask me to do the same.”

“Let him go, Bartleby,” said Cruikshank. “He is right—I cannot force him to follow me.”

I relinquished my grip and watched as Stirling stormed from the cabin.