This boat – sorry, this ship – is the SS Donovan Mitchell. It’s not a bad ship, and it’s not badly captained, and it’s got some things on it you should know about, because they’re important.
This is the first important thing that is aboard the SS Donovan Mitchell: a ticket for passage, one-way, in a berth that’s nice enough to have no rats. Or at least rats that are discreet. It’s more dog-eared than a kennel club squared, and has been nervously folded over and into itself at least a dozen different ways, unbent hourly for another round of neurotic origami.
It is currently scudding its way across the deck of the Donovan Mitchell on the breath of a foul-tempered gale, having escaped from the musty space of the pocket of Jonathon Cranberry. He is the second important thing that is aboard; as scrawny as a kite stripped down to the string and with a frightened, wide-eyed look about him that has a touch of the gecko without that lizard’s broad-smiling charm and appeal. The ticket is beneath his notice as he scrabbles up the deck, swearing at the wind and the world, sweeping his lank hair from his eyes with a shake. Another foot, another four inches, and his hand is on the ladder up – up to the bridge! There’s something important there too, but we’ll get to that later. First, we must speak of who bought Jonathon Cranberry’s ticket.
That man is the third important thing aboard the Donovan Mitchell, and he is now cold and a little stiff where he lies in his bunk down below, in the second bed of the nice clean berth that is only home to one (most discreet!) rat. What a frightful muss surrounds him! His clothes are rumpled, his bedsheets scattered, his face still set in a snarl halfway between fear and defiant bravery. His name doesn’t matter anymore, though Jonathon Cranberry might beg to differ – but Jonathon is busy now. A trunk lies open beneath his bed, kicked on its side by hasty, heavy feet and left to hang at its own discretion.
This trunk is the fourth important thing aboard the Donovan Mitchell. It is old and formed from some probably-extinct tropical wood, browner than the king of all walnuts and heavier than an angel’s sin. Not one mark mars the wood from its recent excitement, and that it was breached at all was a fault of its lock, not itself; the rusty old thing, being but mere iron and steel, gave away at pressure that the trunk proper barely deigned to notice. To its credit, though, it did creak, and that was the rub that led to the shout that ended in blood and running.
The blood in question is leaking down the man’s chest and over the blade a big knife that, despite being iron, appears to have been hewn rather than forged. The jagged rusty bits got stuck on a rib, and it appears to have been trapped within its latest, lastest victim for the present. It is the fifth important thing aboard, though it barely makes the list, deriving, as it does, much of its status from the hands that held it recently.
Those hands are pulling their owner upright now from a pile of freshly-created debris one deck beneath the fluttering of Jonathon Cranberry’s ticket, trembling with leftover fright-and-flight but still tougher than mere bone and meat have any right to be, levering up all two hundred and sixty pounds of muscle without a hitch. Except for that one large splinter in the right palm, which prompted a moaning extraction. But they’ve seen and done much worse, those hands. Beatings, bludgeonings, batterings, bashings, and breaking of bones. Why, not ten minutes ago they drove that big knife – one of a couple of gifts from a friendly employer – right through a grey man’s chest, then snatched up that old carving from his traveling trunk before his heart had stopped its last beat.
The carving was the seventh important thing on the Donovan Mitchell that night – did we mention the hands were the sixth? – and it’s no more, just a fine layer of ash and something finer still, a glaze and a glimmer. If anger gone sour has a smell, it’s in those ashes, as glossy and bright as an oil slick. They’re wafting through the night air in that angry wind now, spilling out of the Donovan Mitchell’s smokestacks. Way down there below, way down in the hull’s guts, is that boiler they came out of.
That boiler is old, old, old. It was the first piece of this iron ship that saw the daylight outside of the smelter, and it’s been chugging along for years and more without so much as a stutter, turning coal and worse into fiery red light and force and motion. But now it’s choking on ashes, this eighth important thing, and it’s choking on the skin-and-bones of a tall thin person with altogether too many teeth and fingers like knives without handles. The doors for its fuel are slammed fast and nearly bent from the force of it.
That tall thin person, the ninth important thing, is far from stranger to the grey man with the knife inside of him, and no stranger to Jonathon Cranberry, even if Jonathon doesn’t know it. It was waiting for that carving down here, all ready to take home its prize and dispose of the evidence. Those two scarred hands were strong and wary, those big solid bones are tough, but there’s power wrapped up inside of some prizes that’s too old to care about strong, and tough burns the same as anything else. The tall thin person knew that, but the hands didn’t, and that was just how it was going to be. Clean, after the ashes went up the pipes. Quiet, once the first scream died. Calm, once the one heart in the room turned black and stopped.
But all of that went wrong, didn’t it? The tenth important thing aboard the Donovan Mitchell happened. Just one loosely stacked crate, rocking just a little too close to the wrong rivet in the floor, at just the right moment. Spang!, and down it goes, crash-thud right between those two pairs of reaching hands. Whoops!, and there flies the carving, twisting in that fiery red light as it comes to meet it.
Well, what happened to that tall thin person after that wasn’t very nice at all, almost as unkindly as it was. Such a shame that nobody knows what it was, seeing as those two strong hands up and ran away so sure scared, ran blind and blubbering and hurled themselves into an empty cabin and fell all over the furniture. But now they’ve chanced upon a prize, those hands. Look, the room’s not all empty – a bottle! Just one important (well, maybe eleventh) shot. Just to calm your nerves, that’s all, that’s fine, no harm. Liquid courage, that’s all you need, a little something to drown out whatever it was that happened down there in the dark. That’s it, back on your feet. Better get out of these tight quarters, you got all turned around. Better get moving.
The Donovan Mitchell is really moving now, and that is the twelfth important thing that happens aboard it tonight. The ship’s wheel is turning as it will, too and fro, slow and slow, and of course the one manning it is Captain Neb, who’s staring out past the windshield with his thousand-mile eyes that look like sad little raisins in a face that’s a sad little prune, darkened to midnight by a million sunburns but still too pale to be healthy. That little kick that hits the Donovan Mitchell just then, maybe it’s from a real big swell, maybe it’s from the engines chugging, maybe it’s the last of those all-wrong ashes clearing their way up from the beast’s iron belly, maybe it’s just an angel dancing on the head of the right cosmic pin, but whatever it is, it makes Captain Neb blink, and he shakes his head and that’s why he sees something out of his eye’s corner
(which is the thirteenth thing)
and hits the deck.
(which is the fourteenth thing)
The fifteenth thing is that Jonathon Cranberry is carrying the worn-out bone talisman in his right hand. The sixteenth is that he’s left-handed. Both of these come into play when that twelfth-lurch hits and nearly sends him over the rail of the staircase and into the big black blue out there. As it is, he drops his treasure, his hope, and his odds of success, and that little trinket, carved by an old shaman in Siberia to while away her eldest years, it goes out there instead of he. Jonathon Cranberry is just young and senseless enough to curse at that, he is. Spilled milk isn’t worth that, Johnny. But because he’s young and senseless, that setback doesn’t hold him down, and he lurches his way up and onto the bridge just in time to be really too late.
This isn’t the seventeenth important thing that happened aboard the Donovan Mitchell. It happened a long ways away, and a long time ago, and it wasn’t a very new story, even in those days. Someone did something with someone else that somebody didn’t appreciate very much at all, and they expressed that displeasure. And when that didn’t work, well, they expressed it differently. Artistically. Good, healthy way to get rid of your aggression and jealousy and all those other emotions you’re telling yourself aren’t in you, as you hack away at that old wood and pour every little bit into each stroke of your little stone knife. Well, maybe healthy’s the wrong word.
Let’s try potent.
And maybe ‘get rid of’ isn’t how to put it.
How’s ‘re-locate’ sound?
And that’s why the seventeenth important thing on board the Donovan Mitchell is what meets the eyes of Jonathon Cranberry as he struggles that slippery latch open and staggers into that room. No proper descriptions for its look exist, because it wasn’t the sort of thing you see with eyes. You see it with your head, and what the head of Jonathon Cranberry saw there that night, well, it wasn’t pretty. Old rotten anger and seeped-in bitterness, all curdled and malformed, stunted from being squashed up inside all those knots and gnarled bits for ages on ages. It’s so big it’s amazing it fit all up inside that carving in the first place – so big it sprawls out over half the bridge and through the ship’s wheel and squishes up against the windows – and that amazement nearly got Jonathon Cranberry’s head taken off, because it hated everything – including him – too much to stand and stare like he did.
The eighteenth important thing that happened aboard saves Jonathon Cranberry’s head, and that’s Captain Neb’s wrinkled old hand reaching up from the floor and groping for the wheel and yanking it. Those little black eyes weren’t needed to see what the Captain did then, and that is that something is trying to take away his ship from him. And that is all that there is to know for Captain Neb, because first it had been his father, then his mother, then his wife, and at last his children. The nineteenth important thing that’s happening there on the Donovan Mitchell, is that the Donovan Mitchell is all that there is for its captain, and he’ll be damned afore he lets it be taken away from him, twice and thrice and twice again.
Now, there’s no shape to this thing that you can see with your eyes, but that doesn’t mean there’s no shape at all, and it certainly doesn’t mean there’s nothing that’s tangled up in that ship’s wheel. And it damned well doesn’t mean that doesn’t hurt it. And maybe it doesn’t have sounds either, that you can hear proper, with ears, but that scream it makes tugs on the heartstrings of the lovesick halfway to Boston and back. Up close it does a lot worse, and Jonathon Cranberry’s on the floor now, holding his ears and yelling, one hand half-into a pocket that just might hold some sort of help. Captain Neb’s fighting hard, harder than anything on his knees, but he can’t get up. Which is why the twentieth thing happens, as the eleventh thing barges in the door sealed inside an iron gullet inside a body attached to two big hands. And my almighty is it courageous now, and aching for a fight, and what does it see but a big blurry mess. Well, what’s a body to do but punch the biggest and blurriest part of that mess as hard as it can?
Lightning strikes, thunder smacks across the bow as the Donovan Mitchell crests a wave, knocking the whole of the bridge around in a jumble, and what but number twenty-one could bring Jonathon Cranberry skidding around and lying right smack against the side of the thing in that cabin as it tears the two hands from its throat. Muscle is strong, but it’s only so much, and it isn’t so old. Doesn’t snap away easy, though. Oh lord, it doesn’t snap easy.
But number twenty-one isn’t that.
It’s the other half of the couple of gifts given by a friendly, thin employer, and it’s just as jagged and clumsy-carved as its sister-blade, and it just fell out of a bloody coat pocket and practically into Jonathon Cranberry’s lap.
Well now, what Jonathon Cranberry does with that is what anyone would. He panics, hesitates, then nearly cuts himself snatching it up in his right hand. Careful there, could put an eye out, but he won’t put that thing out, because it’s got him sized up now, squaring off, holding its ground. Fear of iron is a spiritual thing, it is, but this is older than iron, and what’s older is stronger than iron, stronger than strength itself. It’s even older than Captain Neb, hard as that seems. He’s hanging on tight to that wheel, and his arms are shaking even if his eyes won’t blink. Who’s steering this ship, well, it’s still a close race.
The twenty-second important thing is that Jonathon Cranberry is still left-handed, and so when he makes his move, breaks the stalest of mates, he swings wide and lurches and sends that old iron blade flinging out of his hand and misses everything in the whole damned bridge except for the window, which gets smashed all to shards under that big iron blade. Gone out the window without even a clatter, and good riddance to that thing made by the tall, thin person. Even if it could’ve stood to wait a few more minutes before it took its leave.
Now the twenty-third important thing happens, and that’s that this thing in the bridge, well, it laughs. That scream, it hurt, but the laugh, it makes you sick, right in the heart, right in the head, right where you feel it when you see the wheel of a car strike a kitten. Right there, all swollen and sad.
Thing is, it laughs so loud, it misses that next thunderbolt come down; flash, roar, and all. And it misses, but Captain Neb doesn’t, and in that light he sees the next wave, the twenty-fourth wave of the twenty-fourth hour of that night, coming down on them, and knows it’s time to turn or they’re sunk. And since we know that number nineteen is true, we know they can’t sink.
So Neb takes his hands from the wheel, and that thing wins its wrestling match. And this surprises it so damned much, well, it just about bowls it over – quite a stagger, especially leaning into a trough like the one the Donovan Mitchell just plunged into. Especially when here comes Jonathon Cranberry, young but foolhardy, clumsy but a good fullback. Shoulder-first.
That shoulder takes twenty-fifth, it takes its target, and it takes the thing in the bridge right out of the bridge, through the window, into the storm and the wind and the rain, all the way out onto the deck. All that wavy mass-that-isn’t isn’t so good in a north gale, is it now? But it grasps, and holds tight, and clings to the prow of the ship just as it comes through the trough, held up high to the sky on a metal pole like a bird perched a thousand miles from any tree.
The twenty-sixth comes white and searing hot, and as old as the first storms. And what’s left over is for the ocean’s mouth, and if that isn’t old, nothing is.
There’s quite a fuss come morning, and even more come arrival in port. But all of that isn’t what we’re here to talk about, and there’s just one more bit of that. The twenty-seventh important thing that happened aboard the Donovan Mitchell is that Jonathon Cranberry, apprentice occultist, amateur fullback, and orphan, lost a father, and that Captain Thomas Neb, ex-father, widower, and walking silence, was saved by a son. And there’s nothing that binds a tie so firmly as a tragedy.
Mind you, this all led to a lot more later on, and some of it was even important. But that was afterwards and elsewhere.