STRANGE OCCURRENCES ON THE SS POLYPHEMUS
No one can say for certain, but midway on their voyage from Perth to London—after encountering an unexpected tropical storm 13° S of the Equator—several passengers at sail on the SS Polyphemus begin to suspect a corpse is hidden onboard the magnificent steamship.
“Stashed in steerage, perhaps,” postulates the privy counselor to the Legislative Counsel for the North-East Province whilst seated at a table on the Poop-Deck playing cards. “I caught a whiff of something pungent below deck whilst fetching up this bottle.”
“I should not be surprised if it is Crutchby’s man-eating Aborigine,” remarks a once-rising star in opera fresh off her first Australian tour—an absolute smash success from Brisbane to Melbourne, with the crowds “absolutely mesmerized” (according to The Honey Possum Gazette) by the diva’s “bewitching soprano” and “lovely but murderous eyes.”
“I’ve heard Crutchby himself likes to practice dissections,” adds the wife of the Hon’ble Judge Hatchett. “On the, you know, various… specimens he collects.”
The opera diva holds a gloved finger to her lips, nodding vehemently so that her widebrimmed hat (meticulously arranged with lace, peacock feathers, an aigrette, bright yellow strawflowers, and a scattering of green and gold beetles) flutters in the direction of the infamous physiologist and Fellow of the Royal Society seated alone at a nearby table. He sips liberally from a bottle of rum, occasionally stroking his waxed moustaches and seemingly drunk or contemplative or both.
“Preposterous!” declaims the Reverend, the only person among those gathered at the table not playing cards. “The good Doctor merely seeks to obtain a human subject from every end of Her Majesty’s empire for the upcoming Exhibition! Obviously, they must be alive to count.”
“I’d wager 10-to-1 the corpse is floating in the bilge,” hazards the Chief Engineer of the British Australian Telegraphy Co. Ltd. “That’s the best place to hide a body—so deep no one can find it before we dock.”
“I suppose you’d know better than us,” the privy counselor snickers, shuffling the cards.
“Who's to say there’s only one?” Judge Hatchett’s wife asks. “Corpse, I mean?”
“Shh,” the Chief Engineer hisses. “Watch his hands!”
●
Above the Quarterdeck of the SS Polyphemus, the Red Duster hangs loose without a breeze to unfurl it, though a mist suddenly rises from nowhere to creep over the placid sea and enshroud the ship from its uppermost rigging to its keel. In the obscurity cast by this white fog, suspect figures emerge to slink and scurry about from the ship’s bow to its stern, from its 1st-class quarters to its sailors’ berths, from its banqueting saloons and Turkish baths down to its boiler rooms.
Below the listless ensign atop the Control Bridge, the on-duty helmsman grimaces over the ship’s wheel, pinching himself on the back of the neck and mustering what wits he has remaining—which is to say none—after what feels like an eternity swizzling rum with his shipmates in the Sailor’s Mess. Directly behind him, the First Mate grumbles under his breath as he descends the starboard-side ladder between the Bridge and Navigation Room. In the Skipper’s Cabin below, the Captain—an all-overish “Admiral of the Red”—glances at the shattered chronometer secured to the starboard bulkhead before gazing wistfully down at the jumbled pieces of what can only be a jigsaw puzzle. This puzzle, cut from cardboard, will reveal a map, once assembled, marking out all the ends of the British Empire.
Beyond the captain’s field of vision, a thin solitary fellow clad in striped trousers, a soiled linen shirt, and fresh new peacoat stands atop the f’c’stle. A poet and catamite past his prime, the man stares into the vapours enshrouding the figurehead: the murderous blind cyclops of Odyssean lore. The poet rolls a cigarette and lights it with a phosphorous match, unable to distinguish between the fog and smoke that plumes from his thick pale lips. He considers suicide or some other impossible adventure, simultaneously composing pastiche verses that he immediately—blessedly—forgets:
Through the gloom you sink, tho’ you glide,
Like the moon vomited from the earth,
So tides might rise, and limbic mists hide
All our sordid lives from death unto birth.
“Devil’s balls!” cries one of the stewardesses working the midship berths. She desperately pulls the plunger a second time in the lavatory located outside the 2nd-Class Lounge, watching in helpless horror as the crimson-stained rags in the bowl spiral anticlockwise without flushing.
In the Dining Hall past which a governess now flees, a Moldavian refugee from the Crimean War stares at a spread of Tarot illuminated by a single lantern set beside her. Her glaucous eyes skitter from the cards laid out below her to the face of the successful gold prospector seated across from her. He is returning to Essex, he’d told her, to find his lost love whom he abandoned to seek his fortune. The Madame chews her lips with a grim resolve, tapping the 10 of Swords and 5 of Cups with long unpainted fingernails while wondering just how she will tell this man that he will never see his beloved alive again, or anyone else either for that matter…
Two floors above—in a hall parallel to the Dining Hall below—the Judge’s wife scurries toward the hatch leading to her portside cabin, carrying a bundle of hemp rope snatched from the Sun Deck around her shoulder. She looks both ways, pulls out a key, and unlocks her door, stepping inside to quickly unroll the rope and secure her husband, the Hon’ble Judge, who is groaning sprawled in the debris of a shattered lamp.
Only, she wonders, where has the Bengali boy got to? What was his name? Baboo?
The Bengali boy (whose name was actually Abdul) currently rides atop the Chief Fireman’s shoulders as he heads quickly through Boiler Room No. 3. The Chief Fireman found the boy wandering barefoot earlier, his cheeks sooted black, his eyes wide with what the Chief Fireman assumes must be astonishment or terror. The boy, for his part, only has eyes for the fierce-eyed stokers shovelling coal into the bright red furnaces: Polynesians, Negroes, Chinaman, even a few Irishmen, all with lavish tattoos blossoming across their thick necks and arms. The Chief Fireman quickly hustles the boy out of the boiler room, sets him at the foot of the ladder leading to the upper decks, and pops him one on the britches.
“Now get along, ya lil Fakir!” he snarls.
At the very top of the ladder’s steps, six malingering swabbies crouch in the shadows cast by the ship’s central smokestack. The door leading to the Smoking Parlour creaks open behind them to release two of the ship’s most prolific mistresses in their usual faded dresses and sailor’s boots. One of the women makes a gesture similar to the shaking of dice as the sailors turn to regard them, but one of the nastier deckhands snaps back angrily, warning the two strumpets and telling them to take their wares to the ship’s casino. Both women roll their eyes and strut away in a burst of giggles, leaving the mutinous dogs to turn their gaze back on the Boatswain’s Mate, who this whole time has been lying crumpled in the shadows on deck with a thick trail of dark blood oozing from his ears.
“Let’s keelhaul the bloody bastard,” the deckhand mutters.
Meanwhile, in the aft-section toward which the two prostitutes walk, the Earl of Mount Superb—known across London as the greatest spendthrift among spendthrifts, the gamester outstripping all other gamesters—steps out to gaze into the mist. Although his pockets are lighter than he remembers on entering the casino earlier, there are two women on his arms clad in luxurious, matching black silk. The one on his right is tawney, with raven-dark hair, while the other is a blonde. Even so, on seeing the approaching strumpets, he thinks to invite them to his cabin with the others, but then another figure suddenly barrels between the two parties, causing all to step away save the Earl who nearly collapses on account of his gout.
“A-ho, Prior! Is that you?” this other figure calls out on reaching the ship’s aftmost deck.
A man turns from the invisible foam churned up by the SS Polyphemus’s screws to see this figure, an ex-con who served time in Van Dieman’s Land before making some solid pudding in the fur trade. The former Deputy Inspector for the East India Company relaxes, having gotten on swimmingly with the ex-con ever since the beginning of their voyage.
“You bear good tidings, I hope?” he asks.
“Even better,” the ex-con replies with a wicked smile, “I bear the goods themselves.”
The ex-con reaches into his gabardine to withdraw from its interior a canvas framed in the neo-Greco-Roman style. It is exactly 33 cm by 33 cm in width and length, and portrays an oil-painting of a square-sailed frigate sinking in a tempest of fiery colours.
“Is it authentic, or an imitation?”
“A replica. But it’s not the painting that matters—it’s what’s hidden inside the frame.”
Unfortunately, the lookout—situated hundreds of feet up in the crow’s nest—is too far away to spy the former Deputy Inspector as he pulls a cocked revolver from his coat and aims it at the ex-con. Indeed, the lookout—whilst possessed of the superior qualities of a sailor—has already set the telescope in his lap and slouched down in the barrel to catch a few winks. Nor will he ever wake up again.
Still, just before he dozes off, he thinks he hears something fluttering nearby, flitting about in the stays. He stands with popping knees and scans the rigging below, hearing a loud squeaking followed by a tiny clicking sounds.
Could it be bats? he wonders. This far from shore?
●
[From the Captain’s Logbook]
Entry No. –
Time unknown. Weighed last unknown. Chronometer still not working, nor the telegraph for sending orders to the Engineers in the Boiler Room. I’ve ordered my First Mate to have the crew scour the ship for a working compass, but so far everyone has been as useless as the rest. Perhaps affected by magnetic fields conjured by the storm we encountered? I do not know how much longer we can successfully conceal from our passengers, much less our crew below-deck, the current situation. But then, what is our situation precisely? How far off course could that squall have taken us? Swanson argues we somehow ended up in the Triangle, but I do not think that possible, considering our position before the storm surprised us.
All-in-all we were fortunate, I suppose, to have lost none of our passengers or crew to those raging eddies, but (& whilst I do my best to maintain a hearty corps d’esprit) I still mourn the loss of my poor little Plucky sucked up by the outrageous winds. That sweet little rat-terrier’s final howls still haunt me so!
Are we lost? Am I? If it were possible for me to successfully coordinate our position & get us back on course, would I do it? As a child, all I ever wanted was to go wherever the wind might carry me.
By God, whatever happens, I sure feel lost without my poor Plucky!
A.L.
●
The next day, or the day after—who can rightly say?—the Reverend gives a sermon in the midship Chapel dedicated to St. Ofelia. The Reverend’s sermon takes its cue from Paul’s shipwreck and miraculous survival as recorded in the Book of Acts. Afterwards, the Reverend leads the congregated passengers and off-duty sailors to the Lower Deck’s Swimming Pool where the infamous Dr. Crutchby’s chief “Specimen,” an Australian Aborigine, stands. The Reverend delivers the usual spiel about resurrection before dunking the Aborigine in the pool, lifting him, and crying, “Though savage without, there’s salvation within!” Blinking furiously to get the water out of his eyes, the infamous physiologist’s chief “Specimen” listens to the congregants shouting “Amen!” and “Halleluiah!” and thinks, with a dark and sombre expression, They are all part of the Dreaming…
A costumed ball—open to all Europeans regardless of class—is held later on the Main Deck. A band, complete with a violin, accordion, and a harpsichord, plays all the fashionable hits and favourites: the Yanktown Folly, the Ningbo Massacre, the Kabul Fancy. The privy counsellor’s wife dances with the ship’s Chief Navigator, who presses his lips into her ear, while her husband is curled up in a closet in steerage with a lass from Liverpool. The privy counsellor, deep in an opium reverie, gazes blank-eyed into the haze fogging the closet, recalling a rifle cracking in his hands as he’d looked up to see a magpie goose falling on the other side of the Warrego River—only his satisfaction gives way to remorse as the goose plummets behind the treeline. “You are a vain, simple, weak-hearted, frankly stupid creature,” his mother’s voice whispers inside him.
A cockatoo’s squawks pierce the surrounding bulkheads. The cockatoo, its neck feathers ruffled, stares from its wire cage at the opera diva stirring with a beguiling sort of languor, her movements similar to a sleepwalker’s as she rises from a couch. Possessed with the cleverness of madness, she opens a wood-grained jewellery case etched with silver trim and, inside this case, atop its red velvet lining, there lies a single black box of white matches. The prima donna pulls the matchbox out, snaps the case shut, and strikes one of the tenders to spark the whole box. The flames blossom in her hands and she bursts into a terrific soprano:
E nell’Averno alfin,
Discenderai tu un giorno!
Là l’ombra, mia laggiù,
T’attende nell’infernal soggiorno!
Not as far away as you might think, the former Deputy Inspector for the East India Company smiles a grim smile reserved only for himself, having located one of the sealed compartments marked on the ship’s map previously hidden inside the picture-frame he got from the ex-con: a sealed hatch under the lawn of Bermuda Grass maintained for croquet tournaments in the SS Polyphemus’s onboard greenhouse. The former Deputy Inspector descends into the hatch following a dark labyrinthine passageway, at the end of which he stumbles upon an ascending wrought-iron staircase which he then climbs, its steps spiralling into a wide, lush space.
“Here a maze trod indeed through forthrights and meanders,” the former Deputy Inspector says to himself with a queer laugh, and for a moment simply stares about him at the ship’s legendary secret garden enclosed by brick walls efflorescing with bougainvillea bright with pink petals, the whole garden in full bloom and heavy with the musk of jasmine, orchids, violets, lotuses, and dahlias. He saunters past a round redbrick well rising from a bed of moss toward a fountain crowded with peacocks and swans, there finding—just behind the well, and per the map—a garden gnome, though its once-bright paint is now old and faded. He picks it up and smashes it against a statue of Horatio Nelson atop the fountain, and from inside its hollow body falls a rolled-up piece of parchment. He unrolls this parchment with shaky hands and guffaws to read its curling lovely script marked by a Royal Stamp of Decree:
This INDENTURE hereby entitles the holder to be forthwith proprietor and owner of the Kingdom of Shambhala, birthplace of the next Buddha, and a fabulous country in its own right situated between the 45’ and 50’ N Latitude…
Excited as the former Deputy Inspector is, his premature roar of victory is swallowed up in sudden yelps of pain induced by something cold and stinging and moving like slimy strings down his neck and back and shoulders. He frantically pulls his jacket from his shoulders and swats his arm, then stares into his palm to see a crushed pink-legged centipede twitching as he falls on his face.
And now, rising behind him, the insect merchant from 2nd-class gazes down at where the former Deputy Inspector lies in a bed of moss. The insect merchant holds an empty jar, carefully watching the rare, especially deadly centipedes—a subspecies of scolopendra subspinipes—skitter into the moss, careful to not touch them as he lifts the Title and Deed from the dying man’s relaxing fist.
●
The infamous physiologist, Dr Crutchby FRS now bursts into raucous laughter on the Poop-Deck. Startled, those still playing cards turn to watch him as, shaking with laughter, he commences simultaneously to cry. They watch him as he cracks open a small black ledger-book with trembly hands, then looks down at the pages before him with hot teardrops dribbling down his cleft chin to blur his tiny inscrutable handwriting. At some point, the Reverend comes to speak with him, saying that perhaps his hysteria is likely the result of a spiritual panic induced by the entertaining of certain fashionable theories contrary to the rudiments of good theology.
“There’s no dissecting a ghost, Father!” Dr Crutchby screams redfaced, and as he stands and reels toward the ladder toward the Sundeck. “Can’t you see that’s precisely the problem?”
●
Exhausted from smoking cigars and reading too many German novels, Cal Percy twitches in his sleep on a deckchair atop the poop-deck. Far up in the crow’s nest, Scoresby does the same. Captain Lemons, grave-faced, sits in his cabin muttering something about his lost rat-terrier. Staring at his reflection in the cabin’s glass, it is suddenly as if he can see reflected there not his own image but that of Her Majesty, Queen of Britain and Ireland, Empress of India, Defender of the Faith, and she stares back at him from beneath her diamond diadem with something like tears in her eyes.
Meanwhile, beneath the pitchblack hull on which the SS Polyphemus glides, creatures encrusted in shells lurk and dash, suck and creep, living lives not unlike those of the ship’s hands or its passengers—both awake and forever asleep—all things so uncanny, spellbound down among the deep.
●
POLYPHEMUS LOST.
___________♦___________
NEWS BY THE MAIL.
__________
(From the Standard.)
LONDON, June 13.
The anxiety in the Metropolis caused by it possible to gain entrance to the offices
the foundering of the SS Polyphemus inside.
intensified yesterday morning after news The Queen has herself taken a direct
spread of the catastrophic wreck in shallow interest in this calamity, and is said to have
waters. An unprecedented scene took place sent her own message of sympathy and
outside the offices of Pratt, Fairfax, & Co., inquiry to Pratt, Fairfax, & Co. In this
when the firm which owned and ran the message, Her Majesty has made known how
ship was besieged in the early hours by deeply distressed by the terrible disaster she is
family members and friends of passengers and also personally requested that any
making enquiries. The crowd outside the particulars about what has befallen the Company was greatest between the hours Polyphemus and those onboard be forwarded of ten and twelve o'clock, and after the to both her and her Ministers. names of those presumed to be onboard The Bacchus Rocks, as the rocks on which were written on cardboard paper and the Polyphemus struck are called, are
pasted on the walls, with all eight hundred situated at the entrance of the pass dividing and twenty-three of the ship's combined the African mainland from the group of
crew and passengers presumed lost. So islands comprising Sokotra, Abd-al-Kuri, multitudinous, indeed, was the crowd and the Brothers. They are fifty miles to the
outside the firm, and so distressing the east of Cape Guardafui, and about three lamentations that arose from this throng, miles south-southwest of Abd-al-Kuri
that a special staff of constables was detailed Islands, where a portion of the treacherous
to keep the streets open to traffic, and make rocks can be seen at low tide.
by J S Khan