The Poriferous Darkness

Marooned on a desert island with a black Raven as his only companion, Thaddeus C. Noble spends his long days writing endless letters about his bizarre surreal experiences. A mixture of mundanity, fanciful tales and absurd dreamscapes, he seals his missives inside bottles and throws them out to sea. These hermetic, introverted curious stories are imbued with the underlying enigma of a game whose rules are unknown. The densely obscure narrative collapses both the writer and reader into a circular reality that creates stories out of stories,

BELOW IS AN EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL:

The intertwined lead-grey masses stretched endlessly before him. Filled with such effervescence as if to render everything else stale by comparison the current of air, deeply enriched with the prodigious briny scent of the ocean, flowed ceaselessly across the jagged surfaces of the island, and applied a merciless caress to the gnarly weather-beaten rocks as if to subtract from them the essence of their corporeality. However, failing to obtain what it was seeking, the wind emitted a protracted anguished howl that rapidly swept across the ground, engulfing the surrounding sea in its salient agony.

He stared into the monotonous ceaseless space, and before stepping closer to the edge shielded his eyes against the piercing wind. His heavy boots, lacerated like the skin of a longevous battle scarred sperm whale were securely wedged between the rocks as he turned up the threadbare collar of his jacket against the chill, and carefully leaned over to look into the chasm. The ever moving sea reached its countless fluid appendages deep into the crevices of the rock surface below. Time and time again, the foamy tips, reminiscent of the pallor of a drowning man’s desolate flailing limbs, hopelessly clawed at the dark surface searching in vain for a stronghold on the slippery algae covered rock only to return afresh to repeat their desperate endless toil.

Notwithstanding the rimy layer that had already formed on the dark surface of the links, he grabbed the chain, anchored to an iron pole jammed between the rocks, leaned his legs against a larger piece of rock as counterbalance and began hauling. The chain grated against the furrow that had been dug into the craggy surface by repeated action, and after much strenuous hand over hand dragging that made his arms throb and his shoulders burn, the top of a bowed wooden trap broke through the surface like a small streaked whale. The trap slowly rotated above the water, and as the contents flowed through its narrow gaps, and the weight slowly diminished, he had a strange feeling that the essence of the trap was somehow seeping back into the sea, like the limp body of a dying animal slowly succumbing to blood loss. He kept his grip on the wet biting chain, and waited until a larger wave rolled back into the sea, before he immediately hauled until the top of the trap was within reach. While holding onto the frigid chain with one hand, he reached in between two of the slithery slats with stiffened fingers and heedfully lifted the trap over the edge and set it down on the rock, where the last dregs of water quickly absorbed into the dark crevices. He let go of the chain that fell with a clatter nearly drowned out by the howling wind, and settled, like a dark metallic snake camouflaged in the shadows.

His fingers smarted from the cold, and before he examined the crustaceans that scurried around at the bottom of the cage, he put his fairly broad hands together, blew into the hollow between them and rubbed the calloused palms against each other trying to get the blood flowing, and continued to flex his stiffened short fingers until he felt the telltale tingling sensation in his fingertips. When the slight discomfort had passed, and he could more easily move his limbs, he bent down, picked off a couple of small blue mussels from the chain, threw them back in the sea and turned the trap around to look inside.

Other than his lonely antecedent meanderings along the shoreline close to the city in a life that now seemed so distant, he had absolutely no experience with the sea, so when he had at first arrived on the island, unexpectedly finding himself in possession of a variety of fishing equipment, he had experimentally stuck a piece of dried meat in the middle of the trap and lowered it into the water from the end of the small stone jetty, that protruded from the rocky shore by about eight feet or so, to investigate how it worked before he began exploring other suitable spots around the island. He had laid down on the jetty and watched as the larger crabs, after having tried to squeeze through the gaps had crawled around the netting like armoured spiders in an underwater web and entered through the funnel to get themselves caught in the center of the trap. Later on after investigating the island more thoroughly, he had found this particular spot and though he realized it wasn’t exactly the most appropriate place to set a trap, due to the precariousness of the cliffs and the tumultuous sea, the rock covered bottom was always alive with crustaceans eager for an easy meal.

From the center of the base, stuck on a larger fishing hook embedded in the wood, the ghostly white head of a mackerel stared through the netting with empty eye sockets. Even though the trap had been in the water for less only a couple of days, the head of the fish had effectively been picked clean. The few pulpy strings that were left around the area of the gills spread out from the head like strands of a fine translucent fungus, and inside the hollow aperture, a small cluster of tiny crabs, still feasting on the tongue were moving their pincers searchingly across the pallid surface, methodically picking up small pieces of flesh and depositing them in their fibrous palpitating mouths.

In the back of the trap, lurking in the shadowy corners of the pot, a couple of rock crabs, the colour of wet weathered bricks, sat pressed up against the slats. Their half raised black tipped claws opened and closed in front of their alien faces, and their mouths moved as if they were endlessly tasting the air. A small fanned blackish lobster tail, moving up and down to no avail, stuck through the netting at the front of the trap. He reached in through the small door, hinged by means of two small leather straps, grabbed the small crustacean just behind its head and lifted it out. Finding itself exposed to an unfamiliar environment the lobster spread out its limbs and curved its back in the curious but expected representation of a midair crucifixion. He stared bemused at the creature’s nescient theatrical antics, before he unceremoniously dropped it over the edge. He watched as the small crustacean landed with a silent splash near the rocks and quickly disappeared beneath the foamy surface below. Then he bent down, removed the lid on the small wooden bucket, and after quickly checking the position of the small flock of screeching black-backs above, he grabbed the fish head from the bucket and put it down on a rock shaded by his legs.

The cluster of common terns hovering like a quavering mobile suspended in the air above let time uninterruptedly pass over them as they patiently lingered on the updraft. When he was confident that none of the birds had broken from the undulating formation, attempting to steal the fish head, he reached back into the trap, careful to avoid the now raised claws, and adroitly managed the evacuation of the two remaining inhabitants. He lifted them out of the contraption one at a time and deposited them at the bottom of the bucket and secured the lid.

Although he couldn’t hear it over the sound of the wind, he could nevertheless sense the scurrying legs of the desperate animals investigating the sloping surface of their dark damp confinement. He picked up the milky, almost transparent head that lay like a cool shade in the palm of his hand before hurling it as far as he could into the sea. Before it ever touched the surface, the head was caught in the strong slender red beak of a diving tern and he watched as the other terns chased after the victor with open beaks, their protracted wails dissipating in the howling wind. He bent down, replaced the ghoulish fish head with the newly decapitated one whose unmoving eye had been persistently searching the monotonous grey sky directly above.

He drove the fish head down on the hook, loosened the chain from the crevices in the rocks, and making sure that his feet were clear of the black icy coil, he grabbed the weighted trap with both hands, swung it back and forth and heaved it away from the face of the rock into an outgoing wave that seized and swiftly submerged the wooden prison. The spuming greyish blue waves continued their malcontent clawing against the rock, indefatigably attempting to tear minute particles from the solid facade. They continuously slapped their liquid protrusions against the surface, much as a short tempered parent would attempt to teach a disobedient child a lesson by force.

The chain tumbled over the edge and lay almost invisibly against the dark solidified surface. He waited for the telltale slack of the coil before he picked up the bucket with its still scooting passengers, turned his back to the sea leaving the pandemonium of terns behind, and slowly walked down the promontory, following the shallow trail between the rocks. On his way he passed the small clusters of rotten stumps of what he assumed were conifer trees, due to the piney smell of their dark amber residue. The thin stumps peeked through the grass like blackish tumescent fingers attempting to tame the short tousled strands. Their withered blackened faces permanently gazed at a sky they could no longer reach, and a few slim feathery sprigs attached near the very base of the dead stumps waved their slender needles in the wind like the fibrous gills of a freshly caught fish hopelessly gasping for the last breaths of air.

He walked down the narrow winding path towards the dark stone structure looming in the distance. His current residence, and one of only two man-made structures on the island was a large, slightly tapered cylindrical tower of ruggedly carved interlocking granite, that appeared rather hastily hewn and assembled. Like a giant weather-beaten well, awkwardly but impregnably inserted into the mossy green grass that covered most of the island’s interior, its unfinished base rose out of the dilapidated ground like a dark inselberg rising from a mossy plain. A few roughly shaped rectangular rocks, not, as far as he could tell, geologically native to the island, were strewn around the immediate vicinity of the base of the structures, as if the builders had abruptly dropped them in their haste to leave.

When he had first arrived, confused and apprehensive of the unfamiliar locality and its vexatious ambience, he had slowly walked around the building and without much attention picked up a handful of stone carving tools. A couple of square iron hammers with dense beat-up wooden handles, a selection of rust spotted stone chisels with dulled teeth, and a small triangular trowel whose pointed blade was firmly stuck beneath the smooth face of a rock as if it had been deliberately inserted there until its master returned. He had at first set the tools down on the face of a particularly large stone where they lay side by side like artifacts in a museum display case. A couple of weeks later, he had carried them inside and deposited them in a small wooden box. There were also several remnants of haphazardly made scaffolding, but the remaining four or five boards were broken beyond repair and as he had deemed them insufficient for constructing even a rudimentary raft, he had stacked the pieces against the inside wall, saving them for firewood in case he needed to build a pyre to attract a passing vessel. So far it had not been necessary to move them.

The builders had also left behind a couple of metal poles, one of which was currently holding the trap in place. The other one he had positioned on the top of the wall as an emblematic flagpole. From a number of the remaining stones he had constructed a narrow staircase that reached a little more than halfway up the outside wall on the opposite side of the tower. He had then carried four of the stones up onto the flat concrete roof one by one. They were dense and tremendously heavy and it had taken him a lot longer than he had imagined to get the stones up the somewhat irregular stairs. He had barely been able to lift one of them off the ground, but after tying a piece of rope around each stone and slinging it over his shoulder, he had proceeded to get each one to the top of the stairs where he had used the wall to slide the stone over the top. When they were finally up, he had stood the four stones against each other so that they formed a small square in the center of the platform. He had then inserted the metal pole between them and tied a piece of white cloth, that he had cut from the bottom of his nightshirt, to the top. The fatuous banner now hung from the black pole like a frayed greyish skin of a small rodent, and though it was currently thrashing in the wind, the tiny square was nearly imperceptible against the ashen sky.

Truthfully he didn’t really know why he had deemed it necessary to put up a flagpole in the first place, as there was no reasonable chance that the banner could be spotted from anywhere in the surrounding ocean. Even with a pair of strong binoculars or a telescope it would be extremely hard to spot the ashen grey pocket-sized cloth that clung to the six-foot pole like a tiny piece of kelp to a slim piece of darkened driftwood. Yet it gave him a peculiar comfort to know that the small greying cloth, thrashed about by the blustering wind, was waving above his domicile.

The outside of the tower measured about twenty-six paces in circumference at ground level and the nearly two foot thick wall, approximately nine and a half feet tall, stood on a base of more carefully laid stones that, diminishing in size, created a series of nine convening circles that came together around a smooth black stone in the center of the interior. The concrete ceiling bore the indicative longitudinal arrangements of the fluid fibres of wood and when the door was open, he could easily distinguish the systematic striation where the wide wooden boards had once pushed up against each other, staunching the flow of wet concrete. Five iron rods, about a foot and a half long, inserted at irregular intervals at the top of the wall, surrounded the pole. In a perfunctory lasting gesture, they pointed their dark inflexible skeletal fingers towards the sky, perpetually reaching for something unreachable.

Beside the small clusters of trees that had at one time perched near the precipice, the island consisted of nothing but rocks, differing mosses and long unyielding grass with sharpened edges, and although the building had certain similarities with a grain silo, he couldn’t imagine that anyone had chosen to build something as futile as a depository, as there was nothing but said elements to deposit. When he dismissed the idea of a depository, he thought that the structure had the beginning foundation of a lighthouse, but as there was no other landmass in the vicinity, he had to admit that that seemed an equally incongruous concept. Furthermore; the interior of the tower had no staircase leading up to a second floor and had no windows or any other significant openings, like one would expect to find in a conventional lighthouse, so whatever the structure had been designed for, or whomever had commenced the project, the original purpose of the building remained an enigma.

There was no doubt, however, that someone, perhaps deranged but with unlimited funds at their disposal, had spent quite a significant amount of time and resources on the project, but that the work at some point and apparently in somewhat of a hurry had been abandoned altogether. Although it was now his residence, the unfinished structure still had an air of desolation, as if the builders, when they abruptly left, had also taken the intensity of the building with them, and regardless of what he had done to replenish the interior space, it had so far seemed impossible to fill that particular void.

Though the tower wasn’t exactly threatening or unpleasant to live in, it nevertheless seemed as alien and inauspicious as the day he’d arrived, as if it somehow counteracted his attempt to make it habitable. He glanced at the embossed letters, that someone with a warped sense of humour had carved into the lintel above the door. The writing, slightly obscure in the dreary light, spelled out: “Memento Mori” in thin elegantly carved letters. He withdrew his eyes, turned the handle and pushed against the two inch thick black metal door that screeched on its large metal hinges like a wounded seabird, before it laboriously swung open revealing the darkened interior.