Ketos, or fish in a barrel

“Here there be monsters” – Anonymous Mapmakers

Jimmy ducked behind the barrel to avoid detection, his mark being as ferrety as he was, and paused for a second to let the blighter’s blood settle some. It was an art form – a science – stalking a target. Not to be taken lightly, and not to be bungled, in Jim’s experience. In his world, predator could easily become prey; the streets contained no truly vulnerable victim. Not a-one. Even the little orphan-girlie with her big, woebegone eyes begging on the corner had a blade down her sock, the beaten old woman chewing constantly with her toothless maw a shiv ensconced in her shawl. No. Jim’s experiences, mapped out in a mishmash of scars all over his carcass, had carved themselves soul deep – or as deep as a soul would be, had he one. His hunting grounds, despite being pervaded with the tang of the ocean air, were also tinged with the waft of rot and decay, and were not exotic in the least. Nor were they in any way mundane, for they were deadly dangerous with the game able to turn on the hunter and rend him through desperation for survival.

God-fearing people always feared many other things as well – things that went bump in the night, creatures of the dark. Jim always found it inordinately funny that ‘God-fearing’ and ‘God-loving’ were used as synonyms – as though love and fear were two sides of the same coin, similar to the way the ancients who believed in many gods and monsters worshipped their deities for fear of being struck down by them. That barbarians would have so much in common with the most modern, civilised of men amused his blackened, cynical mind no end. They all dreaded the personification of evil, whether it be devils and demons, or monsters and deities, yet they allowed men like himself to wander amongst them – created them, even, and then set them free on the unsuspecting innocents of the world.

Peeking over the barrel’s top, he noted the alertness had left the tall, lanky bloke's stance, and he turned to continue down the pokey little alley. Good. Unprepared meant easier pickings. And he’d pick away, once the opportunity arose. It didn’t even occur to Jim Feed-fish, as he’d been known since he was sixteen and coming up in the underbelly of his underworld, to feel sorry for the other soul in this skulking, stalking scenario. If Jim ever had had a conscience (which is doubtful, should you ask any in the stews of Southampton, where he had acted as bodyguard and pimp for the past two decades), then it had long since been strangled and shredded by his acts of violence – those born of necessity, self-indulgent pleasure, or pure boredom. No, Jim was not the remorseful – or merciful – kind. Nor the superstitious kind, though he had a habit of regularly rubbing the bright coin dangling from a chain around his neck when he felt the need for an extra bit of luck. Or inspiration.

He'd acquired the coin in a lethal scuffle behind a nameless dive pub perhaps eighteen years ago – he’d never been too good with numbers, and worse with his letters, despite persuading one of the The Silk Slipper’s girls, Penny, to tutor him in-between his shifts as bully boy and enforcer. She had been a someone in her previous life – a person who mattered – before her ignominious fall from grace and morality, which was why she was educated and well-read. And easy to force into service, naturally. Once his penchant for mythological tales became obvious, she told him some of the stories of ancient Greece to help along his lacklustre learning, desperate to avoid facing the consequences should he be unhappy with his progress.

They hadn’t gotten very far, though, before she’d been beaten beyond recognition by two drunken sailors on one of Jim’s nights off. Her death had upset him in as much as it meant no more stories of lascivious nymphs, terrifying leviathans, and capricious gods, and also that his limited understanding of his letters would remain thus. Not a surprising outcome, and not a particularly upsetting one either, to Jim’s way of thinking. Just like that ancient god that had eaten his own children as they were born to avoid his downfall – Penny had told him about that, horror permeating her tone, yet Jim had remained unmoved. Seemed logical to him, and survival-driven brutality was that. Very practical, he was. Still, for some reason, the little engraved figure on his coin with ridiculous wings on its feet amused him and reminded him vaguely of one of the stories Penny had told, so he had held onto the trinket and fallen into the habit of keeping it near. His very own talisman, despite his bald-faced practicality.

Rubbing it now, his sharp eyes tracked the beanpole figure of Micky Mulvaney, for that was his soon-to-be victim’s name, scurrying on and slowly but surely wending his way to the docks in the pre-dawn. Jim followed, catlike in the shadows and waiting for the right moment to pounce. It needed to be soon, because the dawn and its light would make his attack much more difficult, and the element of surprise was absolutely crucial because, though Jim was stocky and his bulk all muscle, ol’ Mick had more than a foot on him in height.

Jim had learnt the hard way not to underestimate the long, slim lads. Their strength was deceptive in their twiglike limbs, and survival acted as an extra motivator to use all they had. When you tried to steal their belongings, livelihood, or very lives, people tended to fight with their everything and might take a part of you with them, for their trouble. And he was planning on stealing all of these and with them, a future, from the man named Micky Mulvaney – whose only crime was having something that Jimmy Feed-fish coveted. But in doing so, Jim would do his level best not to pay in pain or injury for his theft.

The law of this jungle of narrow, pokey alleys strewn with refuse, of this habitat of cutthroats and cutpurses, was to be the deadliest creature. The thing in the dark, the monster under the bed. Fear and love of life – two sides of the same coin. He lightly traced the raised letters on his shiny memento:

H E R M E S

The name meant nothing to him, though he knew Penny had explained its significance at some point – something to do with thieves, luck, and travel. But he had all of the former two that he’d ever need in his life; and now he’d have the latter. If only this task could be completed successfully.

The young man’s head, cap set rakishly askew, bobbed and weaved ahead of him, his hair sticking out at odd angles in the outline. Jim made sure to soften his footfalls as he sped up to shorten the distance between them; still lithe as a boy at thirty-eight, he prided himself on his mobility while others his age creaked and began to slide interminably down the sloping banks to the River Styx. He had the will to survive – and his own will far outstripped any hold the Fates might have tried to exert throughout his life.

When Jim had been a young lad, before he’d finally landed on the streets for good, an old woman had had the keeping of him on the outskirts of the harbour quarter. She had been a termagant of the first waters – a gorgon – and a pious one to boot, living by the maxim “Spare the rod and spoil the child”, and for the time Jimmy had lived with her, exercising rigid control over his every perceived misdeed.

‘The Good Book’ was studied, religiously as it were, and even though he couldn’t read and she did little to remedy the situation, he had managed to memorise many of the long, prescriptive passages under pain of beatings or starvation. He could still remember being locked away in her dark, grimy little closet for days as punishment for his sins, with her rule book as his only companion. Running his fingers along the scarred and roughened leather cover, over and over, he traced the words with his fingers:

T H E     H O L Y  B I B L E

And further down:

K I N G   J A M E S   V E R S I O N

Yet the one true lesson he had learnt as a lad was his own strength of will. He could withstand much more than he thought he could – of violence, of pain, and of hunger. But most of all: he could do what was necessary to survive. He now understood that he both railed against the Fates with his will to survive despite all odds, and simultaneously acted as their servant in dealing with and despatching others. Which was why, at approximately ten years of age, Jim turned up on the streets he had left so many months before, and the widow Raines was found with a broken neck in her hovel and no trace of the orphan she had housed to be found thereafter. His life as Jim Feed-fish was well underway – captivity and freedom, all rolled into one, inescapable reality.

“‘The meek shall inherit the earth…’, but in the meantime, the strong shall have the keeping of it,” Jim had told himself and others many times over. However, when things started to go belly-up with his business associates in the brothels – one couldn’t bash a few sailors and girls straight anymore, it seemed – Jim suspected his loved-and-loathed Fortunes had abandoned him. The gods of whom he was a monster had finally forsaken Jim Feed-fish, but he’d be damned if he’d not rage against them till the end. He was looking for an opportunity to move on – needed one badly, and then said opportunity presented itself in the form of hapless, naïve Micky…

“Off to the New World, then, Micky Mulvaney, my lad?” the publican had asked with interest, clearly knowing young man’s tale.

“Aye, so I am. Got the ticket and all me bits and bobs ready for when we set sail tomorrow,” the silly boob had trumpeted, unaware that Jim had been sitting in the darkest corner of this, more reputable, establishment in an effort to lie low, his erstwhile associates having strict instructions regarding him.

The last bloke he’d knifed had apparently been the last straw, it seemed, and Big Ted had called for Jim’s “moving on”. The irony: Jim Feed-fish would be feeding fish himself in the not-too-distant future. Unless an escape presented itself. And then salvation had arrived in the form of the sacrificial lamb, Micky, with his ticket to sail to the new world and a large sack of gear to get him there. A new world, and a new life. A new name too, for who in New York knew Jim Feed-fish, the cutthroat with a penchant for Greek tales, a skill for reciting Bible verses, and a ready blade? No-one. Which meant a whole new hunting ground would be open to him once he completed this oh-so-simple task. Mick would be Jim’s ticket – Fortune favoured the bold, after all.

Thus, when the perfect moment presented itself as he and his quarry reached the docks, Jim let himself be led by his instincts – sharp and deadly from being honed on the streets of the port city he was about to leave behind, like that bloke ‘Icarus’ in the story Penny had told him once. Like a fish in a barrel, the lad hadn’t been expecting it, which made Jim’s task much easier than expected, and once he’d disposed of the hapless, helpless carcass that had once been Micky Mulvaney, he pocketed the precious ticket, picked up the weighty pack and slung it over his shoulder, then whistled as he walked out into the open air of the docks – the golden rays of the rising sung limning his swaggering figure in gold.

After hanging back for a few hours and camouflaging amongst the various bric-a-brac to be found at the wharves, it didn’t take him long to find his berth as the figures on his ticket (which he’d traced multiple times in the shade of the building he’d been leaning against) matched those neatly painted shapes on the ship’s bow. He had been keeping a jaundiced eye out for any of Big Ted’s lot in the crowds milling around the docks, and so he clattered up the gangway as fast and surreptitiously as possible, head bent and shoulders hunched – his hat pulled low over his forehead to disguise his features as much as possible. The sooner he got out of the open and found his cabin, the sooner he’d know he was safe. Predator and prey, simultaneously. Fear and love of life.

The ticket officer checked his ticket in a cursory fashion and waved him through, clearly bored during the quiet lull of early-morning boarders. Jimmy touched his cap deferentially, turning his blood-splattered pant-leg away from the turned-out boy’s range of view, then stepped smartly onto the ship. He wandered deeper and deeper into the bowels of the colossus, the confined passages he navigated to reach his cabin feeling oddly, freeingly familiar (if a bit too brightly lit for his dark soul). He had spent his entire life within the confines of narrow spaces, after all – a monster locked away within a maze with its victims. Now he was confined within this monster of steel, like Jonah within the belly of the beast. Though, of course, the biblical story didn’t truly apply to him, for he was sure he wasn’t the only unbeliever on this ship, nor was he superstitious enough to consider a giant sea creature doling out judgment and ultimate justice to be even a remote threat to him. He was locked away in his little cabin, but he was still free.

Now, lying on his bunk awaiting the ship’s whistle to announce their departure, Jimmy laughed aloud at the beautiful symmetry of it all – he just needed to hold on until the ship left port, like that bloke, Theseus and his princess did to escape the murderous king. Once they sailed, he would truly be free of the shadow of impending doom, cast by the people he had considered both his comrades and potential adversaries for most of his life. Prey and predator, friend and foe, captivity and freedom. As in those Greek stories he liked so much – Theseus and the Minotaur, Jason and the Argonauts, Perseus and the Gorgons, Andromeda and the Sea Monster – you never knew what you were getting, or what the end of the story would bring.

Just then, the ship’s whistle sounded to announce their departure, loud enough that even the vibrations of the engines, which had started up quite a while ago, could not completely drown it out. Jimmy chuckled in relief and victory – he had made it. Escaped the jaws of hell and was sailing off into the sunset, as the expression went. To a new life, a clean slate, and new opportunities. His talents would most definitely be of use in his new home, for people were people – and monsters were monsters – everywhere and in all times. Oh yes, he’d definitely fit in.

As the pulsing of the engines lulled his feelings of triumph into more relaxed lines, he fished his ticket from his pocket, noted the light brownish misting of droplets at the edge, and traced the letters of the ship’s name with his finger. He knew the letters, but it took him a few tries to sound them out in his slow and tedious fashion:

R M S    T I T A N I C