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The Port of New Cellis
An original piece written in homage to the style of 19th century nautical-survival horror
~1500 words
“The port of New Cellis, dead ahead, Captain!”
The ship careened through the storm, waves as high as mountains crashing on the deck, threatening to throw me off as I clung to the railing.
The captain was a foolish old man, proud and set in his ways, and he'd made a wager about getting through this storm. He stood by the wheelman in a bid to appear unfazed, but he was drenched with saltwater and rain and he looked more like a ragged, stumbling beggar than a highly decorated captain. If we lived, I might kill him myself.
The ship bowed into the trough between waves, pitching the deck forward. My feet scrambled on the slick wood and only my burning arms kept me in place. The black water roiled around us, splashing white seafoam with every battery against the hull; a perpetual mist of breaking waves created a second rain. White lightning cracked above us like the smiting hand of God.
Now, perhaps, would not be a bad time to make peace with God.
The cry of distress drew my attention to the bow:
A young seaman released his hold on the railing.
I watched him scramble, attempting to run across the pitching deck through the sheets of rain.
What is that fool doing?
“Man your post!” the captain thundered.
The young seaman did not halt his flight, except where the rolling ship forced him.
I did not recognize the sailor, but he was wearing the striped blue-and-white shirt of the armada’s contract seaman. He wasn’t an old hand, but surely this wasn’t his first storm?
The world wouldn’t right itself, and I’d lost all sense of up or down except the plane of the ship’s deck: at times the horizon spun perpendicular to the deck, as if the world had tilted on its side and the ocean was spilling on top of us. Sometimes the bow leapt, racing skyward with the speed of a bird in flight, and I could only see black clouds and white lightning, the rain and seawater flying toward my eyes like stinging hornets. At times, the worst times, the bow pointed straight into the maw of the churning black sea, and I knew we were going under, sliding forward with a weightless rush, and the bowsprit pierced the sea like the hide of a beast, and, with a spray of white foam as the bow struck, the water would force my eyes shut; then would a sickening lurch pull my arms, threatening to rip me or the railing from the ship and fling us both through the air, driftwood and I, partners into eternity (blessed railing, lover of my soul!), and the sea rushed over me as a freezing river, but, upon reopening my eyes, when it abated, would I find that we had managed to somehow stay atop the hellish sea and the ship stay in one piece.
Had I known what lay ahead, I might’ve jumped from the ship then and been dashed or drowned as the gods saw fit.
For then I saw what the seaman fled.
A great kraken’s tentacle, gray and suckered and thrice as long as the mast, slammed onto the deck, writhing like a snake. It found purchase in the railing and wrapped around the ship’s girth.
“Almighty God,” I prayed, my voice audible only to my ears.
But the sea washed over us yet again, and the tentacle vanished… or retreated.
In my land-certainty and pride I had dismissed the stories of great sea beasts that surfaced only in dire storms; I had not believed that such beasts rose from the abyssal depths when the tossing waves and thunderous cracks of lightning foretold certain death for the whole crew: I had scoffed at the wrinkled old salts that said only when annihilation was assured would such monsters emerge from the deep; only then they would attack, confident that no survivors would bring tales of them to shore, lest they be hunted for sport, profit, or white-hot vengeance.
The ship pitched upward and askew like a leaping animal: sailors called out in terror as lightning illuminated that the storm had not thrown us, but the great beast had risen from the ocean and swatted us aside. The ship’s entirety was flung sidelong into the sea, slamming us under the surface for a silent, frigid moment, and racing back up with a crash of water and white seafoam, the railing and I washed with unholy baptism and yanked to and fro with such force my head struck the wood and only Providence’s mercy kept my eyes open and my mind sharp.
I knew it was the end.
But perhaps Providence had other plans:
The ship's mast splintered as the beast reared its tentacles and rained gray flesh like falling timbers across the deck: the railing behind me blasted with the sound of gunpowder and splinters of ship flew: a sharp pain struck my back below my ribs and I groaned in agony, my grip momentarily slipping. A wave reared. I screamed with the wrath of a dying man and leapt to my railing and embraced it for all I was worth. The wave struck the ship, the mast, weakened by the monster's attack, cracked and groaned, and fell to the ship’s deck: it crashed against the railing, and blasted another rain of wood like mortar shells exploding. The wave passed under us astern, throwing the deck sideways, pointing the broken mast high like a raised spear. The creature lunged for the ship. The trough between waves rolled the ship toward it, plunging the wooden lance into the cursed beast’s gray, slimy head between its black eyes. It curled its tentacles and roared and slipped beneath the waves.
Yet it was not mercy: the sea, jealous of her hunt, had slewn the beast so she could feed on us herself.
“The rocks!” the wheelman cried.
To whom he cried, I knew not; the captain no longer stood beside him.
Through the curtains of water and seafoam that whipped around us, I saw a dagger of obsidian stone jutting from the sea: it glistened with rain, a pulsing ring of white foam around its base. It was nearly double the size of the ship, and beyond it the lightning illuminated its brethren like a row of teeth extending from the far shore.
Every wave threw us toward it like the heaving, staggering lurch of a drunken man. Sailors screamed, their wits driven to madness like chalk driven to dust; they flung themselves from the railing to the mercy of the black sea, the sounds of their animal terror swallowed by the tempest. Wave upon wave battered the ship and swallowed us in fits of dreadful, cold silence as we flung closer and closer to the rock through the maelstrom, as a drowning man is drawn under again and again in a swift river to the rapids. The stinging of rain and the burning of saltwater blinded me.
But I would not die.
I set my will in defiance to God, who had surely ordained my death in this horrid place, and, lips drawn to expose my teeth, roared to the heavens like a caged beast.
The ship, empty of all passengers save me, struck the rock.
I flew.
A groaning crack split the air before I crashed into the water and into the silent, writhing belly of the sea.
I opened my eyes but saw no path to the surface; blackness and shadow swallowed me.
I coughed. Air flew around my face, past my burning cheeks, rising behind me.
I whirled and clawed my way upward, following the guiding savior found in my own breath: I swam past timbers the size of trees, jagged as saws, ripped from the ship like the flesh of an animal ripped in the jaw of a lion. I saw my former compatriots as I writhed madly up, up, up: the kraken’s gray tentacles darted between the wreckage to pluck seaman from the bleak dark and feed on them one by one, the lance lodged in its boneless, undulating head.
I turned all my will to the distant surface.
My treacherous stomach heaved and threatened to draw a deadly breath of frigid black water: my back burned where I was pierced: my lungs were aflame: my arms screamed with molten, leaden weight as they grappled through the water: my mind possessed no faculty for thought beyond, Rise! Rise, damn you, rise!
I broke the surface and opened my whole chest, my abdomen fulfilling its entire diameter with a horrid gasp.
I shuddered in pleasure as sweet, sweet, glorious air filled me! As a newborn babe takes its first breath to scream, so I breathed above the surface and screamed in ecstasy, raising my fist over the waves!
And there, a piece of driftwood bobbed upon the surface: it was my railing, or, I imagined it was my railing: the sea churned about us and I fell upon it, trembling.
After that, I remembered not.
…
I awoke laying on a shore, cursing the sunlight burning my eyes, for its dryness and heat split my skin and ravaged my throat of all moisture.
I saw a face, a man’s face, blot gratefully the horrid yellow orb, and heard his voice, though in my delirious state I understood nothing he said.
And again, I fell into darkness.
…
I awoke on a bed and searched my surroundings.
A simple room, plain walls, a wooden chair, and a thin door accounted for the entirety of my mysterious, meager abode.
A window sat in the wall and through it I saw blue, untroubled skies and the distant, brownish towers of the Hall of Kings, a landmark famous throughout all the civilized world.
I fell upon my pillows, unable to blink or look away from the sight.
I, alone, had made the port of New Cellis.
