The Accursed Read online

  memory; no mind. For God has not yet been made man in

  that place, nor ever God. So it is promised & so I believe.

  Is it your son Josiah who writes these stark words, or

  another?—no matter: we sail to terra incognita as one.

  Believe that I love you, even so. But do not pray for me, as I

  have asked you—that is the purest love.

  Josiah

  FOR THE FIRST several days at sea, Josiah’s malicious “voice” was quelled, as if by the hardships of the sea voyage with its rocking, and tossing, and pitching, and dipping; and the slow-dawning realization among the crew that the handsome Balmoral, a sailing ship of three hundred tons, was far less seaworthy than her owners claimed. Though the ship was graceful enough in harbor, and impressive to the untutored eye with her slender hull and numerous dark-hued sails, a photographer’s “prize” to be published in the New York Herald and elsewhere, it soon developed that she was a vessel of considerable age and service, having been under the command of many men from the time of the ill-fated Captain Franklin to the present day.

  Josiah soon learned that the Balmoral was overloaded, as a consequence of Captain Oates’s frugality, and that of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society generally. Despite the ship’s modest weight and proportions, and despite the fact that she was bound for the most desolate and treacherous waters on earth, the Balmoral was handicapped by many tons of coal, pony fodder, and wooden huts; sledges, cans of gasoline and kerosene; scientific equipment, and clothing; and cases of diverse practicability ranging from sweetbreads and kidneys to canned mutton. Of dog food alone there were hundreds of pounds, not to mention the restless animals themselves (at least thirty-five huskies); and not least, a gallant little battalion of ponies (at least two dozen). The ponies Josiah took pity on at once, for he had always loved horses, and had had a young horse in the Crosswicks stables, for years, which he’d often ridden; as the ponies gazed at him with frightened eyes he could feel their terror, and share their sense of doom; for were these beautiful creatures not fated to perish in the heaving sea, or in the wilds of the Antarctic, or as food for dogs, or for men? “I will protect you, if I can,” Josiah promised the ponies, who stamped and snorted and switched their tails; he stroked their heads to calm them, and took note of their rolling eyes and bared teeth. “I won’t allow anyone to slaughter you and eat you, I swear!” It was a sign of Josiah’s growing weakness of judgment that, before a week on the ocean had passed, he was often prone to tears whenever he visited the ponies in the dank, smelly hold; indeed, that he allowed himself to visit the ponies so frequently was a sign of encroaching infirmity.

  As the voyage proceeded, with day following day in a stupor of boredom or in a paroxysm of alarm, depending upon the weather, it became clear that Captain Oates of the Balmoral was not quite the Captain Oates of the Waldorf. So seemingly forthright on land, unpretentious and matter-of-fact, Oates began to reveal an unpredictable and petty temper at sea; so lost to the minimal courtesies of his class as to appear on the Balmoral deck unshaven, with collar and cuffs lacking freshness. Most bewildering to Josiah was the captain’s habit of joking with the rudest of his sailing crew, while he turned away from the few gentlemen-explorers on board, and the two or three “men of science”; and turned from Josiah with a sneer, if Josiah tried to approach him.

  “What, my lad? Is’t some special favor you want? Only just wait—a ‘special favor’ will come, I am sure.”

  Josiah was aggrieved and hurt, as a boy would have been in his place.

  Only because Captain loves you. Lusts after you. Dreams of enticing you between his sheets. And indeed Josiah could do worse than succumb. For once locked in his cabin you might strangle the brute with your bare hands, for very joy.

  SO IT HAPPENED that Josiah’s dreaded “voice” returned, as in the recrudescence of a disease, to prove just the first of numerous urgings of which some were no more than a whisper but often so hollow and echoing in Josiah’s skull, the accursed young man worried he might be overheard by one of his comrades. Just below the equatorial meridian the voice informed Josiah that a mystical vision was gained if one climbed like a monkey to the very top of the main mast; for he might then gaze not only beyond the ocean’s horizon, but beyond the polar mountains as well, to Heaven itself—where God’s face glared white-hot and seething. But a moment’s effort, Josiah—yet it will calm your seething soul forevermore.

  As the ship made her perilous journey past the Falkland Islands, beyond that ice-locked coast of Antarctica known as King Edward VII Land, the voice urged Josiah to throw off his bulky clothing, and bare his head, and leap overboard, that he might test the elasticity of the waves at this latitude; for it was a never-recorded phenomenon of the Ross Sea, that though the black waves heaved and churned, and spat up frothy skeins of white like the strait between Scylla and Charybdis, they were yet not comprised of water dense enough to support a man’s wake.

  A man of science would experiment in such a setting: how the great seabirds float, that are nearly Josiah’s size, float and dip with the waves, and never sink; and mock you with their bird-courage, as something less than a man.

  “Josiah, no! Stop him, for Christ’s sake. If you must, throw him down. Tie him up.”

  Later Josiah would learn that he’d been prevented from throwing himself overboard by several of the sailing crew, and carried by force down to his cabin; and made to sleep, by ingesting a quantity of brandy and laudanum from the captain’s private store. But Josiah wondered if such tales were malicious, as he’d learned to “turn a deaf ear” to the blandishments of the Curse.

  “It seems that I will never have peace, and never for a moment inhabit my being with the ease with which the albatross inhabits his.”

  ONE THING WAS CLEAR: the eye-piercing sunlight of the Antarctic was beautiful beyond all human language, and Josiah counted himself blessed to have come so far unscathed. So frigid was the air, one could not easily judge whether it was injurious to the lungs and heart, or communicated a voluptuous thrill as it pinched, pricked, stabbed, slashed, and seared white-hot, seeking entry into the human body at every exposed pore.

  I do not hurt! I give no pain!—so promises the Cold. I shall numb your senses in the sweetest oblivion.

  “I wish you’d told me of such an enchanted place, Grandfather,” Josiah said to Winslow Slade who stood beside him one day at the ship’s railing, “—why so much preaching from the pulpit of God, and of Heaven, and of the bloodstained cross when you might have spoken the truth?”

  Winslow Slade in a heavy coarse-textured oak-colored coat, a woolen cap on his head; his ravaged yet dignified features squinting against the perilous sun; white eyebrows thicker than Josiah recalled, and fine pale lines bracketing his mouth that twitched in a murmured response. And what Winslow Slade spoke, Josiah could not hear for the wind rushing about them.

  “Grandfather, what? What are you saying?”

  And again Winslow Slade spoke, his pale mouth moving in near-silence.

  Forgive me.

  THE WONDROUS UNFATHOMED ocean—polar mountains jutting upward into the stark-blue sky—the sea spray clinging to all surfaces of the Balmoral, and freezing to an exquisite radiance; mile upon mile, hundreds and thousands of miles, vast acre upon acre and field upon field of icebergs and glacial rock; the crevices, the glittering knolls, the needle-like stalagmites that pulsed with godly incandescence from within: were these not mesmerizing?—and did they not obliterate all human senses and memory?

  How distant, how inconsequential the village of Princeton, New Jersey, from the underside of the world!

  Raise your arm before you, and bare the wrist. Clamp your carnivore’s teeth upon it, and bite and bite and bite. For there’s your consolation, my dear grandson.

  But Josiah recognized the blandishments of his old enemy, and did not succumb.

  THE GRAY-SPECKLED PONY’S eyes rolled in terror as she floundered chest-high in snow, and stumbled, a
nd snorted; and in panic released a steaming spray of urine, that stained the snow yellow; and in a terrible instant the dogs were upon her, tearing at her living flesh. No! Stop! Josiah was shouting. But the ravenous huskies would eat, for they were starving. But the men would eat, for they too were starving, and knew themselves doomed.

  I shall not eat Josiah vowed. Not I.

  Captain Oates had, by this time, so overcome his gentlemanly scruples and the good manners of his class, he ate with relish the steaming flesh, and stooped to suck the hot blood; and, leaning back, his mouth stained red, offered his young comrade Josiah Slade the “most succulent of the inner organs, the kidneys” for his delectation.

  I will not. Not I.

  In a paroxysm of shivering Josiah woke from this nightmare, which he knew to be not a mere dream-phantasm, but a vision: for Josiah knew it would all come to pass, within a few months’ time. Once the Balmoral reached its destination, and the men disembarked to “explore” the vast white void before them, it was inescapable. Ponies, and howling huskies, and Captain Eric Campbell Oates’s bloodstained muzzle, and the triumph of his mad eyes. Come, my sweet Josiah, my dear boy—the most succulent of the inner morsels is for you.

  After this, on the lurching deck of the Balmoral, all the huskies that were chained topside—(and very much weakened, poor brutes, by the driving rain and sleet)—growled deep in their throats when Josiah passed by. Their muzzles were flecked with foam and their wet eyes jerked in their sockets. These sledge dogs were killers, trained from puppyhood to attack any stranger approaching their master’s sledge.

  PLAYFULLY JOSIAH WONDERED: was he, in fact, by the strait-laced standards of Princeton, New Jersey, now standing on his head? That is, upside-down? For he was in the Southern Hemisphere now, far from the temperate regions of the northeastern United States.

  Yet his gallantry remained. Like instinct bred in the bones of his Slade ancestors, it remained.

  For one evening at dusk, unless it was a luminous dawn, an incautious woman, dressed splendidly in ermine, with a matching hat, and fur-trimmed boots, ventured too near the dogs, that she might pet their handsome heads; with the immediate result that the nearest of them attacked, and within an instant her ermine-clad arm had been terribly torn and mangled, and streams of blood flew into the air; and Josiah rushed forward, for he had gloomily prophesied such an incident, observing the woman making her way along the deck, with an outstretched hand; seeing that the injured woman, in shock too severe to allow her to scream, was Mrs. Adelaide Burr, whom he had not glimpsed in years. As the dogs barked and howled, and lunged at the fallen woman, prevented only by their chained collars, Josiah pulled her to safety; or, to a spot on the bloodied deck that would spare her further harm; seeing that she lay mangled and bleeding from myriad wounds, her face scarcely recognizable, and her small pale bosom exposed, cruelly exposed and bleeding from a dozen wounds. Josiah cried for help, and tried to stanch the flow of blood with his coat-sleeves, and his gloves; and the ermine coat; but blood had already frozen underfoot, the deck was covered in ice-blood, and he slipped, and fell, and struck his head, as hard as he had caused Pearce van Dyck to strike his head on a hardwood floor, and Jack London on the plank floor at MacDougal’s.

  Will no one save us? Is there no one? No God? No—Savior?

  So the dying woman whispered as Josiah lay unable to respond.

  On the open deck in a howling wind laced with sleet he was discovered sobbing and despondent as a boy who has lost his mother. His tears had frozen in his eyelashes and in his short scruffy beard and the flesh of his face had lost all sensation.

  “Shall we tie him in baling wire this time, sir? What is the captain’s wish?”

  THE CAPTAIN’S BELOVED CAT Mungo Park was a double-toed black Manx who slept with him each night at the foot of the captain’s bed, and purred deep in his throat when he was stroked, and showed particular affection—(so Captain Oates explained to Josiah who lay fevered and convalescent in the captain’s own bed)—by making kneading motions with his claws, and seeming to “nurse” against human flesh.

  The glory of Mungo Park was that he had nine lives, of which only four or five had been used up.

  Though Captain Oates dearly loved his big black tailless Mungo Park there were men aboard ship who did not; for one morning when Josiah was recovered enough to return to the deck, he observed the burly creature climbing to his customary perch atop some rigging, and saw not long afterward a sly ruffian reach up to him with a rod, and startle him into hissing, and losing his balance to fall howling into the sea.

  A chorus of cheers arose. Captain Oates was nowhere near. Josiah leaned over the railing to seek out the abandoned cat—an inconsequential bundle of what appeared to be matted black fur, rocking in the waves behind the ship—with no idea of what to do. A Negro crew member said with a grim chuckle, “Mungo Park is the Devil’s own. He will never drown. He will never die. Don’t shed a tear for Mungo Park.”

  (AND SO IT TURNED OUT: for early the next morning Josiah was wakened by the creature’s guttural purring close beside his head, and the rhythmic kneading motions of his partly sheathed claws against Josiah’s chest. And, ah!—the beauty of those coolly-glowing topaz eyes!)

  BY DEGREES JOSIAH succumbed to the Ice Kingdom. Wondering why he had eked out his existence until now in the greenery of—(what was its name?)—the village of his birth, and the hoary old estate-house called Crosswicks? Somewhere in the State of New Jersey, of no more size and consequence than a gigantic iceberg.

  No matter: the Ice Kingdom was eternal. By day and by night he was entering it.

  Parallel lines there were beyond counting in the (newer, revised and updated) Scheme of Clues; yet, as Josiah studied the chart, the lines extended, and distended, and whipped about to form clumsy circles—touching mouth to tail, it seemed.

  The Antarctic moon swung around to hang motionless in the sky, so gigantic it threatened to bump into Josiah’s head, had he not laughingly ducked, and crawled on hands and knees into the darkness of the hold; crouching behind a barrel of flour; until there came a cry—Josiah? Josiah? Where are you hiding?—and the sweet laughter of his baby sister Annabel who searched for him in the old slaves’ quarters behind Crosswicks, that had been converted into storage buildings.

  Shortly it seemed that the sea was composed of shallow puddles, that sparked and winked with secret marine life; and, though no vegetation seemed to be at hand, tendrils blossomed everywhere—unless they were serpents that wriggled out of the black water, to stretch over every surface; and, when a man’s head was turned, to flash across the deck and into the hold? Josiah shouted, and kicked, and stamped, and tried wildly to thrust the serpents away, for they were underfoot as well; the more insidious, that they could not be seen with the naked eye.

  In the distance, beyond a shattered ice floe, the upheld head of a great serpent, moving, like the Balmoral, in an unflagging southerly direction to McMurdo Sound.

  “That? A ‘sea serpent’ they are called,” one of the crew explained to Josiah, as if he’d asked a very stupid question. “There are many of them in these waters but as we pay them no mind, they pay us no mind.”

  In the wake of the great serpent, however, came a curious balmy breeze fragrant with Grecian windflowers, and daffodils, and narcissus. Josiah breathed deeply and swallowed the air. For he knew himself saved.

  I shall not develop scurvy like others of the crew. I shall not suffer weakened blood vessels in the brain that, popping one by one, produce foolish hallucinations, and nightmares at noon.

  PROFESSOR PEARCE VAN DYCK protested that the blood vessels in his brain had not weakened; he had been in “full possession” of his faculties until the very end—when Josiah had killed him.

  Josiah begged for forgiveness but Pearce van Dyck persisted, now accusing his wife Johanna of “base adultery” and the baby sired by the Fiend “no child of mine but a demon.”

  Josiah blushed to hear his old professor speak so coarsely of
his own wife and protested that he found it very difficult to believe that Johanna, of all women, had been unfaithful to her husband; the more so, in that the baby appeared, to Josiah, to be an entirely normal baby, of no particular distinction—neither exceedingly beautiful, nor ugly; rather, of the very essence of human baby.

  Pearce van Dyck interrupted with a bitter chuckle, to declare that the “marital paradox” first reasoned out by the Church Father St. Gregory the Great in the sixth century explained his position: the “carnal act” within Christian marriage is innocent even as the desire for such an act is morally evil.

  Josiah clasped his mittened hands against his ears and tried to argue that Christian marriage, like all marriage, could not be morally evil; but Pearce van Dyck refused to listen. Josiah relented, saying that brothers and sisters had no need, and no urge, to marry; therefore, no requirement to wed; in this way, the “paradox” is transcended.

  Pearce persisted in his argument, drawing close to Josiah until to Josiah’s surprise his features shaded into those of Captain Oates, who comforted Josiah by stroking his fevered brow, and pressing his cold cheek against Josiah’s fevered cheek, and embracing him tight as any brother, or lover. Yet at the same time, Professor van Dyck seemed still present, if not visible, and at a little distance of about ten feet, grimly intoning:

  Who will take little Baby?

  I, said the water deep.

  Baby will float in his cradle boat,

  And I shall rock him to sleep.

  THOUGH THE DELICATE little flowers were but satin lilies of the valley, prettily sewn to the bridal gown, yet they gave off a sweet fragrance of actual lilies, causing Josiah to inhale so deeply he began to stagger about like a drunken man. He would not have abandoned the mill-girl Pearl to her coarse companions. He could not find it in his heart to quite forgive his grandfather, for such cowardice. O help. Josiah. My dear brother. Do not abandon me on the ice, Josiah! Her frightened voice lifted with the sea breeze and sent him reeling across the deck. Was it—Annabel? But where? So far from home? Ah!—starboard she drifted, crouched barefoot and trembling on the ice, her hair whipping in the wind, not very prettily; and her strained face, pale as alabaster, turned to Josiah in desperate appeal.