Parliament of the Atlantic

Picture from Wikipedia

Bit of a delay getting this one out, my first instance of writers block since starting this. But I'm quite pleased with this daft story inspired by information passed on to me by my sister, Rebecca Lindsay,, zoology student of note. Thanks to her for checking my science and to Joseph Crouch for suggesting a tweak to the ending.
I think I'm going to do another chapter of Simon: Time Displaced Knight next week, but I reserve the right to change my mind at any moment. 

Anyway, please enjoy

Parliament of the Atlantic

Professor Barley had placed the subject in a tank about 4 feet square, which she had filled with water and placed on the deck of the Stoneking.  It was heavy enough to remain immobile as the ship, a former fishing trawler and now the Professor’s personal floating fiefdom, rolled in the mid-atlantic swell, gentle by the standards of the great ocean, but strong enough to send unsecured items, belonging to me and the other six interns rolling merrily around below decks, creating minor chaos.  At the top of the tank, a glass lid weighing approximately five kilos blocked the open top pretty much completely, except for a metal bar, wedged between the tank and the lid, with its end in the water. 

The object of this exercise was to observe the animal within the tank attempt to escape.  Professor Barley had wanted to extract a wager from one of us on the likelihood of that happening, though no one would take the bet, it looked very unlikely to us, but nobody was smart enough to bet against the Professor anymore.

The animal in the tank was currently languishing grumpily at the very bottom, lying flat against the glass, her skin flushed a sulky red, perhaps in protest at her confinement, rough handling, and the various containers she had been sloshed in and out of since blundering into one of our nets.  I walked over the deck to peer closely at the thing while she was still relatively still.  I wanted a good look at her skin if she decided to change colour, but mostly I found myself staring into her great big beautiful eyes.  They were filled with a life I hadn’t totally expected.  I’d been studying marine life at Miskatonic for the last three years to get my degree, and now I was filling up the summer before starting my masters with this internship.  In that time I had noticed the live specimens I had studied fell into two distinct categories, the blank stares of cute, dumb, little fish.  Or the blank stares of utterly terrifying ‘stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back’ type things that would bite you just to find out if you were worth eating. This was different, the octopus didn’t stare blankly at all, she looked at me, her eye moving around slightly as she took in the details of my form, my face, the sunglasses resting atop my head and my hair, its thick dark brown waves restrained in a ponytail for now, my khaki shorts and my Miskatonic Greek Council T-shirt. I still doubted she knew or understood what she was looking at, but she seemed to. I asked Professor Barley about that.

“You know Kayleigh, I wouldn’t like to say how much they comprehend about us, but I bet it’s more than you’d think. The whole point of this test is to show you how intelligent these animals are.”

“I thought we were supposed to be grossed out by a bit of sea snot squeezing through some tiny gap?” Juan Delray remarked from off to one side, his perpetual smirk creeping into his voice, not for the first time.  I rolled my eyes and made a loud ‘Tsk’ noise, this was involuntary, driven by my loathing for the man-child.

“You’re all postgrad marine biologists,” The professor said to the group, ignoring the tone of Delray’s interjection, “I should hope you understand how an octopus body works, no skeleton, very flexible, etcetera.  What we’re looking for here, is signs of her intelligence. Notice there isn’t actually a gap anywhere for her to get out of the tank, but she could use that little bar as a lever to make one.”

“Octopuses are amazing, but also terribly unlucky,” She continued, “Their intelligence, as a species is so great that they can solve complex puzzles and outwit pretty much any other creature in the sea, but their lives are brutally brief, the males die after mating and the females starve to death while caring for their eggs.  If they had evolved their way out of that, then they could have developed a society. One whose sophistication rivalled our own.”

Delray waddled over to the tank, hoisting his cargo pants back up over the crest of his globular hips, a task of sisyphusian proportions, then bent over, placing his lunar landscape of a face directly adjacent to the creature in the tank.  The two beings exchanged glances for a moment, then Delray rapped sharply on the glass with his meaty knuckle.

“Do something bitch!”

“Juan! Enough! We’ll talk about this afterwards,” Professor Barley admonished.

“Just getting the ball rolling Professor,” he said, before turning to his accomplice, Billy Matheson, and sharing a loathsome grin, both making a strange snorting laugh.  As he turned back to the octopus, she moved suddenly, flying at the side of the tank, tentacles first, as if to attack.  Though the glass prevented it and left her splayed across the side of the tank with her suckers and beak working furiously.  The professor threw down her clipboard in frustration,

“Fucking hell Juan! She’s too agitated to do anything now,” then she said to the group, “Ok, better make it chow time everybody, we’ll have another try at this tomorrow, while Mr Delray assists all with an extra turn on net-mending duty.”  The students filed out to the sound of Juan’s spluttering protests, I was last to go, watching the poor creature in the tank as the Professor and a couple of the regular crew attempted to recapture her, gently, and return her to the small tank she’s been kept in previously, there were tentacles everywhere as she flailed about, confused and frightened.  In that moment I felt truly sorry for this creature, supposedly so clever, being kept in a box for us to study.

That night I lay awake in my cramped bunk in the crew quarters, listening to the others snores, grunts and sleeping murmurs.  Delray wasn’t there, his net-mending would keep him out on deck for another few hours, which gave me no small amount of satisfaction.  However all I could think about was that octopus, alone and frightened in the tank.  In her eyes I had glimpsed something, the more I ruminated on it, the more I became convinced she could understand everything that was happening, that she felt shame and despair at being reduced to a specimen to be examined and tested. In the end I decided I would release her.  The little tank she had been moved to had a lock on it, I resolved to sneak into the main cabin, where all the specimens, living and…not living were kept in various boxes and bags, stacked nearly to the ceiling, pop the lock on the octopus’ box and walk away.  Plausible deniability would be my defence after that.

I got out of my cot, pulling on my dressing gown and pushing my feet into my slippers, shaped like the gaping maws of two great whites, and tiptoed out of the room, and down the tiny corridor to the main cabin.  I had to take special care to steady myself against the roll of the boat, bracing my arms on either wall. 

I pulled up short with a start as I edged round the corner into the cabin, there was a pair of feet sticking out from behind a pile of boxes and packing crates, one foot was bare and one had a sock pulled half off, they were twitching and convulsing silently, as if their owner was having some form of seizure.

“Hello? Are you ok? Who’s there?” I ran over behind the stack, and then, I’m not proud of myself here, I screamed like a victim in a slasher movie. 

The person prone on the floor was Juan Delray, I only knew this by his faded Rush t-shirt.  His face was totally obscured by his assailant, the octopus. 

How she had got herself wrapped completely over his head I never knew, but her slimy, pliant body made a perfect seal, bulging outwards occasionally as beneath her, Delray struggled to breathe.

I stood, frozen to the spot, utterly horrified as the creature completed her act of murder, her skin changing from angry red to a light blue, the colour an octopus turns when satisfied and contented.  Delray shuddered his last and was still.  In that moment I understood the motives of the creature on the floor. 

Revenge.

She had understood Juan’s cruel mockery and planned a strike of her own, I saw now her box, the lock broken and the lid pushed open, creating a tiny crack which had allowed her to escape.  The fridge, which stood in the small nook that constituted the galley, was open, its yellow light giving a sickly hue to the scene.  Delray must have come in from his net mending and sought himself a midnight snack, one he would now never eat.

The octopus slithered off Delray’s head.  Removed from the water her body lay almost totally flat, a gelatinous pancake of tentacular malice, eyes poking up from the slowly moving mass, looking around, while the arms stretched out across the floor, feeling, searching for their next target.

Still unable to shake my limbs from the terror inspired torpor, I felt a tentacle brush my feet, thinking soon this sea creature would envelop me, cutting off my air as she did to Juan a moment ago, but she moved on, instead hauling herself up a table leg, onto the keyboard of the ship’s main PC.  Facebook was open on the screen and the action of her questing arms depressed keys, spelling a series of random characters in the ‘what’s on your mind box’, before another arm pressed the backspace and deleted everything.  With torturous slowness, she pulled her whole body up onto the desk, and arranged all her arms so they snaked over the keyboard.  One by one, characters appeared in the box once again.

“moar cCuming. yOo pEritty.  go Naow.”

Suddenly, she dropped from the desk and slid across the room, squeezing under the door which lead out to the main weatherdeck with a sudden burst of terrifying speed. The letters spelt out by the creature on the computer lurked at the back of my mind, I still considered them to be random characters, glimpsed in a hurry and not considered further.  I ran to the door and threw it open looking out onto the deck, lit by floodlights in the darkness.  The octopus was pulling herself up over the rail at the edge of the deck,  I imagine our eyes met again as she sat, draped over the rail like a wet towel, then she dropped into the sea, regaining her true shape in the supporting embrace of the water and disappeared into the abyss, powered by a jet of water.

I leant over the rail, trying to get a glimpse of her as she receded, and was nearly thrown from the ship as there was a great crash, and the groaning sound of metal under stress.  The ship lurched violently, and seemed to have stopped suddenly, as if the anchor had been dropped and caught on something immovable. 

I saw more shapes in the water now, approaching from the blackness, they seemed to surround the boat, thin at first, moving swiftly and in formation.  Then as one they spread their bodies to slow down, tentacles now visible and their skins changing from pale blue to deepest red.

I wanted to warn the others, but there was barely time before they slithered up the sides of the boat and infiltrated through every tiny nook and cranny.  I watched from the lifeboat I had commandeered as the lights all over the Stoneking went out, and listened, agonized over the screams of the crew and my fellow interns, which fell silent shockingly quickly.  As I gunned the lifeboat’s engine and sped in the direction I reckoned the eastern seaboard must be, I saw the boat begin to settle astern, disappearing under the waves, perhaps they had made a hole in it somehow?
In the madness of that night it seems silly to recall, that a glowing plume of tentacled flotsam seemed to rise, in two great pillars.  Taller even than the main faculty building at Miskatonic, embracing the floating tomb called Stoneking.

Untitled Blues Horror Fantasy Thing

Here's a segment from my first, glorious, failed attempt at writing a whole novel. While I didn't finish, I still hide behind the death of my laptop as an excuse, not admitting to myself I was already running out of steam when it happened. 

The Story involved Demonic Possesion, 1930's Blues Musicians, Punk Bands, North Korea and Time Travel, it was essentially several ideas mashed together to make something I could conceivably string together up to novel length. I won't finish it in it's current form, but may reuse some of the ideas in future things. 

Anyway this is the first, and probably best, bit that I wrote, It is presented in it's original, unproofread form, for added stream-of-conciousness authenticity.

The rain poured hard against the windscreen of the model t ford as it bumped and rattled down the highway, the wipers ran madly in a futile attempt to keep the screen clear of water as more and more fell from the sky with each passing moment, the man at the wheel hunched over and squinted into the feeble glow of the headlights trying to see his way through the rain and the gloom of the storm. The man kept his foot firmly on the gas though, and the model t hurtled on regardless, on to its destination and to hell with any risks or consequences.

The Ford bumped down into a puddle and kicked up a great splash of muddy water, squarely over the head of Son House, as he squelched along the grass verge on the side of the road, sticking his clothes to his skinny body and drenching his fedora hat so that it flopped down over his face and eyes. Another person might have cursed and raged and shook their fist impotently at the driver and vehicle as they sped around a bend in the road behind a tree, but Son simply gathered his coat around him, sighed and trudged on, beginning to shiver. His preachers collar began to chafe him in the damp so he removed it and put it into an inside pocket, just after this he moved the carpet bag he was carrying from his left hand to his right, for a more comfortable grip.

He had been walking all day, except for a break for lunch by the side of the road, others might have tried thumbing a lift from one of the cars that passed along this route, but Son preferred his own company and in any case he knew very well how easily any person could be turned from righteousness to casual sin, to the outright diabolical, something he was out to address this very day. And now was nearing his destination, and this sudden downpour was not about to deter him any, especially since he would not be surprised to learn that the man he was travelling to confront could well have had a hand in its creation.

Some minutes after the car had given Son its ungracious soaking ad made off into the night; House rounded the bend himself and saw his destination, a Shotgun house a little way back off the road. A light was on to one side of the door and smoke curled from the chimney, firewood had been piled up on one side of the house to such an extent that the pile was taller than the house itself.

Son House considered how best to approach the house, considering the welcome, or lack thereof he was likely to get, the rain had stopped and would no longer mask his approach as he had hoped it would, he was tempted to try and sneak around the back and try to gain entrance there, surprising his quarry and muttering the catechism as quickly as he could before escaping, the chances that this plan would work seemed low, but walking straight up to the door seemed even less promising.

The decision was taken from him in any case, because as he approached what had initially appeared to be mere shadows on the front porch resolved itself into a figure, leaning back in a rocking chair, feet resting up on the rail at the front of the porch, with a guitar across his lap. Stupidly, Son froze, all options gone as his adversary stared straight at him, smiling, it would be foolish to run now, so all that was left was to go straight in, as mad as that might be. Son stood up straight, adjusted his hat, which had gone from soaked to merely damp and recovered some of its shape and strode over to meet the enemy, who turned his head and spat before speaking,

“Good evenin’ preacher man, I didn’t expect to see you again so soon after our last meetin’, though you seem to have grown a little raggedy since then.”

Son stopped in front of the house and dropped his carpet bag to the floor, reaching inside he pulled out a small book, and a wooden crucifix. The man on the porch chuckled,

“Oh my goodness! Am I supposed to recoil in terror from that symbol?”

“Be quiet boy,” Son growled, his voice rough from the whiskey he had drank to give him courage on the last stages of his journey, “Keep you silver tongue behind your black lips, you shall not frighten me!”

“No, I expect you’re too drunk to be scared o’ anythin’ much right now ain’tcha buck? You wanna keep an eye on that Son, too much Dutch courage and you’ll start needing a drop with your breakfast even.”

Son ignored this taunt, He had wrestled with the bottle much of his life and this obvious ploy would not rattle him. Though he knew this man could throw much worse at him and in all likelihood he would never walk away from this house, that knowledge gave him a kind of peace. His life had been, by and large a struggle between the two halves of himself, the sinful side winning out more than he’d like to admit, but at least if he were to die today he could die doing the lord’s work and saving the soul of the man in front of him, a young man who had been his friend.

“Robert Johnson! If you are still in there, know that I mean to bring you salvation tonight my son!”

Son then opened the book and began to read aloud the words, which were Greek and meant little to him, though he was glad of the money he had spent paying a scholar at Old Miss university to transcribe the words phonetically into this notebook, ready for this moment, sometime country preacher and occasional drunkard Son may be but he was also nobody’s fool.

As Son began to read, Robert Johnson stood up from his chair, put aside his guitar and walked into the light for the first time.

He had dressed himself in a fine new double breasted suit and hat, paid for with the money he made playing guitar in bars, clubs and juke joints as well as the occasional classy hotel if the rich white clientele felt like slumming it by partaking of some race music. He had grown in stature as well from the boy Son had known back in Robinsonville, Mississippi, and now seemed to radiate confidence in such magnitude that it approached, or even became, arrogance.

When Son Had first met him as a youth on the cusp of manhood, Son himself was drifting into middle age, his pastoring days behind him and more well known in the delta as blues musician and a band mate of Charlie Patton, which was perhaps why Robert had sought him out. He had been a skinny little boy with a guitar over his shoulder that he could not play for love nor money, though he did blow a mean harmonica in those days. He had wanted Son to teach him, but Son had been too wrapped up in his own guilt at the direction his life had taken to impart anything to Robert beyond a lecture about ‘The Devil’s Music’, something which Robert seemed to have taken to heart in a most unexpected way.

As Son continued to read from the book, and Robert moved to walk up to the preacher, the clouds in the sky began to thicken and the wind picked up, swirling about the two men madly. Robert, started to stagger, crouching slightly with a pained look on his face. Son raised to his voice to be heard over the sudden wind, still reading the meaningless text and hoping like hell it did what it was supposed to. Robert was moaning now, pained, clutching his belly and crying aloud,

“Stoppit Son! I can’t take no more boss! Please have a little mercy!”

“You done brought this on yerself boy!” Son hollered back, breaking his chant for a moment. This was all Robert needed, As the power of the incantation waned, he jumped up as if a great weight had fallen from him, and lay the preacher low with a haymaker punch strong enough to fell an ox, and seemingly one that could only have come from a much stronger man. Son fell face first into the mud, losing book and cross in the process, as he turned back over he found Robert standing over him, seemingly ready to deliver a killing blow.

“I’m sorry boss, I wish you hadn’t seen to making a quarrel with me, I would have left you well alone.”

As he lifted his foot to stomp in the older man’s head, Son reached into his pocket and pulled out his last resort, a .41 Derringer, as unnaturally strong as Robert had become, this was still likely to hurt, perhaps long enough to buy Son time to escape.

The first round hit the younger man in the chest, and should have punctured a lung, a killing shot all on it’s own, though if Robert noticed this he gave no indication and took another step forward. The Derringer had another three rounds loaded and Son fired them all, two bullets hit in the trunk with no more effect than the first. The final round, more by luck than judgement, hit Robert Square between the eyes, blowing of his hat and lodging in his brains. Johnson sank to his knees, blood dripping down off the end of his nose and staining the stiff collar of his shirt round the back of his neck. He looked at Son and opened his mouth to speak, but only a garbled nonsense came out. Son stood up, soaked again and covered in mud, he looked down at the bloodied man

“I’m sorry i had to do this boy, I hoped you could be saved, but it seems you done and gone too far mixed up in this foolishness to be brung back out. May god have Mercy on you.”

Robert looked back, still mumbling gibberish until the light went from his eyes and he fell to the ground.

While Son was burying his body, Robert Johnson woke up with a great intake of breath and a piercing scream of agony. Son caved his head in with the shovel he had been using to dig the grave.

Opting instead to burn the body, Son dragged the nearly headless corpse into middle room of the shotgun house, found a bottle of liquor in the kitchen, smashed it on the floor and set light to the whole mess, then stood outside and watched the house burn to the ground. As the rafters began to cave in, Son glimpsed some movement in the woods behind the back yard. A burning figure had lept from the back door and was now running through the trees, some way away, Son made to give chase but back luck lead him to trip on a root and knock himself out cold not ten feet into the forest. When he came to nothing remained of the house but ashes and of Robert there was no sign.

Those were the first three times Son House killed Robert Johnson.