Coffin Island (10 page)

The mermaids were hitting them on the
head with oars. They were throwing harpoons at them. They were
gaffing them. Mermaids were pulling pirates on to the skiffs like
blubber fish. They were gutting them alive which was wonderful.
Pirates were screaming in agony while their livers were ripped out
of them like tuna fish. The whole mess was then dumped into the
ocean. Let witchcraft sort it out. It was killing for the sheer
pleasure of it. It was a beautiful thing to witness. The gore was
fabulous. Shocking, breathtaking and delicious, it made me question
everything like good art should. My whole existence was in the
pendulum so I suppose it was a heightened state. It was like
something out of The Museum of Modern Art. There was no denying
that we were down in the gory wing with the butcher paintings. I
was thrilled that I had been granted admission even if I was part
of the deadly subject matter. Why not hack the head off that bull
even if the bull is you?

The pirates that were still alive in
the ocean, sadly, were defending themselves with cutlasses. They
were swimming under the skiffs and trying to board them. The
remaining pirates were determined fighters. Begrudgingly, I had to
grant them that much status. Very begrudgingly, I might add. They
were somehow human. Their viciousness hinted at it.

The remaining pirates were decidedly
difficult to kill. I always admire those hard targets. I can’t help
myself seeing as I am one myself. You have to admire those savage
holdouts. There just aren’t that many of them left.

The weak had been quickly slaughtered
as they should be. From time immoral this is how brutal war should
be waged. Brutal savages must paint the earth in blood with brooms.
Then the meat grinder comes out hungry to eat. That voracious
machine must have its meat. However there was something jamming up
the grinder. How did that old chicken bone get in there? He was
choking off the dog of war.

Professor Coffin managed to board a
skiff. He couldn’t even die properly. I wanted to watch him die in
the most undignified manner possible. Sitting on the toilet with
his head cut off. Throw it into his lap as his last bowel movement
exited him. What the hell was he doing saving himself?

Professor Coffin refused to do anyone’s
bidding. Not even a mermaid could convince him of anything. He had
snuck up behind one that was gutting a pirate. I thought those
stupid fish were mind readers. The mermaids just couldn’t fathom
his thoughts.

Were his thoughts just too garbled?
Were they just too destroyed by rum? Or were there just too many of
them that ran in constant opposition to each other? It was like
trying to understand the mysteries of the universe. It was easy for
that old black hole to catch a Mermaid off guard.

Professor Coffin grabbed her golden
hair. The last expression on her face was one of abject shock.
Professor Coffin had pulled it off. To send his point home he
pulled the long golden hair taut. Then he decapitated the mermaid
in one swift hack. Violence was one of his unrecognized areas of
excellence. I hadn’t seen that coming. Bravo, costumed fool,
bravo.

Professor Coffin was a butcher of the
first order. I was finding it necessary to rethink my position on
him. He wasn’t just a janitor. He could make fine messes too. Blood
was spurting everywhere. Who knew that a mermaid could hold so much
blood? Then again the emerald ocean was brutally cold.

Professor Coffin raised the mermaid’s
head above his head. Crimson blood poured out all over Professor
Coffin’s own head. He drank in the blood like a savage of the first
order. Was he drinking in the magical power of his kill? Perhaps he
was just thirsty from rum dehydration. He then let out a battle
cry. It was horrific. The whole world shook. Professor Coffin
possessed massive power. Even I shuddered. He could call down the
universe on odd occasions apparently. What a mop jockey!

The remaining pirates in the emerald
ocean boarded the skiffs en masse. The mermaids could presumably
read the thoughts of that savage rabble. It must have been horrific
to be in their minds. They tried to flee into the emerald ocean but
the pirates speared them with harpoons in the skiffs. They stabbed
harpoons right through them.

The mermaids were tasked with reading
the thoughts of their assassins? You have to think what your killer
is thinking right before you died? All that hate is coursing
through your mind as you are savagely murdered?

I found myself rooting a bit for the
pirates now. Why not mix it up a bit with witchcraft? Take the
unexpected view. There was also the fact that I was currently under
the captivity of a mermaid. The tides seemed to be turning a bit
too. It was time to rethink my original position in this
battle.

The pirates were still a pretty bad bet
though. They were definitely killing all the mermaids. The problem
was that they were spearing their own skiffs. They were killing the
mermaids with such ferocity that they had no sense of
self-preservation. The pirates were overcome with rage. They were
stabbing the mermaids with the harpoons with barbaric force. They
weren’t just driving their point home. They were driving it right
through the hulls of the wooden skiffs. The skiffs started
sinking.

No one had ever accused the pirates of
being delicate even in their victory. They were winning the battle
and sinking their skiffs at the same time. Something told me that
this was not the first time. Victory and defeat were mixed states
for the faculty. However the outrageous rage was fully
understandable. I was trying to plot the death of my own mermaid in
a pocket of my own mind that she couldn’t reach. I looked off to
the horizon and tried to have hundreds of thoughts that were in
opposition to each other so that I might hatch an effective plan to
kill my captor.

Hunting is nothing more than that. You
study your prey deeply. Then you kill it with brutal force. Don’t
forget to drink the blood afterwards. If you’re going to be a
brutal savage then go all in. Why stop short of eating the beating
heart?

The stitches that had fallen off the
sails were being devoured by enormous sharks in the near distance.
Even the stitches were getting killed? Ignorance seemed like it
should be some sort of protection in this world. What to make of
this slight against ignorance? Was this world devoid of a shred of
rationality?

Ration just got rationed out to you
like so many crumbs periodically so you wouldn’t go completely mad?
There was going to be some hell to pay if I could figure out who
was truly in-charge of this world. I wasn’t buying that whole
witchcraft excuse. It was certainly out-of-control. There was no
question about that. However I had reason to believe that someone
was manipulating the chaos.

My chief suspect was Professor Coffin.
That was one of my diversionary thoughts. I tried to play that one
out to distract the mermaid. The funny thing is that it was true
too. I aimed to kill Professor Coffin. I wanted to chow on his
heart. I figured it was fake so what harm in that?

The stitches were letting out blood
curdling cries as we swam past them. Sharks were devouring the
stitches piecemeal. The dreaded fins were beginning to close in on
the sinking skiffs that contained the remaining living pirates and
all the mermaid parts. It was a fine day on the emerald ocean for
the shark. The other occupants were too busy butchering each other
to bother with the corpse collector. It helped explain the enormous
size of the beasts. They were the last mouth on the emerald ocean.
They ended all arguments with a snap.

The emerald ocean looked like it had
been chummed with tankers of blood. It was an oil spill of plasma.
There were also hearty hunks of pirate and mermaid flesh. It looked
like a fine soup for the primordial. A heel of bread was all that
was lacking for the steaming bowl of red chowder. How about a
Bloody Mary on the side? Might as well make it extra spicy seeing
as chances are your stomach is coming out.

There weren’t any coffins on the
emerald ocean apparently. Someone had forgotten to draft that.
Bobbing around like soup crackers for the squeamish. The emerald
ocean looked like a sewer of death. It was a cesspit in that cheery
little burg, the hamlet of Hades. Was there anything to be
concerned about here? Welcome to aquatic hell. Who needs Flemish
Hell as Professor Coffin suggested when we can do the Caribbean
version of it?

Chapter

Fortunately a primordial shark of
apocalyptic proportions attacked my mermaid as we reached Doctor
Fast. I hadn’t come up with much of an alternative plan of attack.
I was merely going to try to pluck her eyes out. I was thrilled
that the shark had bailed me out. Now I just needed to get out of
its primordial way. It was like trying to duck a mechanical street
sweeper after the contraption has sucked up your vehicle. Sorry
about that miss. I didn’t mean to devour your automobile. Stop
complaining about that. You went through the windshield.

The shark looked like a dinosaur that
had somehow had the pluck to survive the last ice age. It had been
swimming around for millennia under the ice eating all the frozen
corpses that dated back to the dawn of creation. I immediately
liked the beast. I wasn’t put off by the fact that it had been
consuming my web fingered predecessors since the dawn of dawn. Why
let Darwin trouble your mind at a moment like this? Who cares if
fish can walk?

Ribbons of blood floated out of my
mermaid’s skull as it was separated bodily from torso. There was
that appalling horror to quiet the mind. A splash of hot blood in
the mouth settled my nerves.

I pushed her lifeless corpse towards
the barnacle covered apocalypse. It was not a pleasure to meet you,
shark from the beginning of time. And I don’t want to ever see you
again. Stay out of my nightmares too. I’m just going to close my
eyes, scream in my sleep and pretend that you don’t exist. I have
never seen a shark of the apocalypse. I don’t know what you’re
talking about. That mind of yours is quite clever though. I will
grant you that. Dangerous and clever, that’s how I like my mind. We
should nip out for a cup of hot blood some time and chitchat art
and whatnot.

There was a rope with some knots
hanging into the ocean. It was one of those little helpers that
were in such sparse abundance in this world that I immediately
seized it. I quickly climbed up the rope as the shark devoured the
mermaids. The mermaid would surely just whet the appetite of that
appalling beast. I didn’t want to watch it satiate that primordial
appetite. The thought of me in the belly of that beast was just too
horrible to contemplate. Apparently there is a nanosecond of
consciousness when you get your last thought before you’re own your
way to whatever afterlife that you believe in. I aimed to forestall
that final moment for a bit. What’s the hurry?

I hauled myself on to the deck of
Doctor Fast with a shudder. I was wondering how a pirate could get
reassembled in a coffin after a shark attack of such magnitude. I
could only imagine what sort of primitive digestive track with rows
of retractable teeth was lurking within that horrible beast. The
colon surely had teeth. You must come to in your coffin as a
buffalo chip. Fortunately I was one of the chosen few who were
moving on to better things in this world than a predawn
gastrointestinal track with incisors all the way down the track. I
thanked my lucky stars for that as I watched the final mermaid bits
go down the hatch. You had to admire the thoroughness. Only a
werewolf attorney wouldn’t applaud that.

Doctor Fast was a high performance
sailing craft. It wasn’t some leaky scow to transport human cargo
in shackles. Go fetch the rum and come back. Try not to catch
scurvy or die in the doldrums. Watch out for the pirates and those
hideous natives too. Don’t let the white people cheat you on the
black people too. Make them pay handsomely for those humans that we
have purchased. Welcome to the Caribbean. It’s not just some
foolish ride in Florida. I was doing way better than
that.

Doctor Fast was an astonishing craft.
Somehow I felt like a bit of a slave to it though. Perhaps it had
something to do with the shackles on the deck. They had attached
themselves to me. They sort of hinted at the slavery
concept.

There was something very brutal and
distressing percolating below the deck of Doctor Fast as well.
Something seemed to be screaming down there. I dismissed that noise
as so much lunacy. I was more preoccupied with my own situation.
How could I be a slave in this world? How could I be a trinket for
a better person to purchase?

My ship was a slave ship. There was no
denying the concept. The shackles made it painfully clear. There
was also a little footnote on the back of the ship under the name,
Doctor Fast. It said slave ship under the title on the back. There
was that. It really upset me. What does witchcraft think that I’m
stupid? Putting a footnote on a slave ship was truly insulting.
Weren’t the shackles enough? Why taunt the slaves after you’ve
enslaved them? There was also the shouting below deck too. It was a
bit distressing. Witchcraft was doing the usual.

Doctor Fast was going to take me to the
next school where I would sit on a block for a prospective buyer. I
wondered what sort of buyer witchcraft had for me out over the
horizon. Shall we take the journey to find out?