Edgar Allan Poe — Chapter 4: A forgotten maritime map in an attic — Novella Movement 1

I set down these lines, not for the satisfaction of any vanity that survives in me, but because a chain of reasoning has fastened itself upon my faculties with such tenacity that I can discharge it only by the slow mechanism of the pen; and because you, whoever you may be that read this, will perhaps judge with more equanimity than I possess whether the discovery I am about to relate belongs to the order of coincidence or to that darker order of things for which our vocabulary, presuming as it does a universe of separate and discrete causes, has provided no adequate name. It was in the attic of my late grand-uncle's house — a chamber low-beamed, indifferently ventilated, and so long neglected that the dust upon its floor lay in a stratum as undisturbed and as legible as the silt of some ocean bed — that I came upon the map. It was of vellum gone the color of weak tea, its corners eaten into lacework by damp and vermin, its soundings inscribed in a hand cramped, backward-slanting, and — this I noted only upon the third or fourth examination — annotated a second time, in ink of a different age and a different temper, by some later commentator whose marginal figures bore no evident relation to depth, or current, or hazard, but rather to intervals: to the ticking-off, in small Arabic numerals, of durations so exact that I began, almost against my will, to suspect them of a purpose more arithmetical than nautical.

You will not, I think, deny that a chart is among the most honest of human documents, professing as it does no ambition beyond the safe conveyance of hulls across water; and it was precisely this honesty that made the second hand's intrusion the more disquieting, for it converted an instrument of navigation into something nearer a ledger — a record, not of coastlines, but of recurrences. I might have set the matter aside as the harmless eccentricity of some dead surveyor had I not, three evenings later, exhibited the map to an acquaintance of mine, one Vasilos Kray, a man of restless intellect and stranger appetite, who occupied the ground floor of my building and who maintained there, humming behind a locked door at all hours, a machine he called, with the peculiar reverence men reserve for their instruments of profit, his terminal — a server, close-packed with circuitry, through which he executed, in fractions of a second too small for any human pulse to register, his transactions upon the markets of three continents. Kray was not a scholar; he was that more dangerous variety of intelligence, quick, acquisitive, incapable of awe, who reduces every mystery immediately to the question of its exploitation; and when he bent his eyes upon the marginal figures of the chart, I watched a change come over his countenance that I can describe, with all the precision at my command, only as the visible arithmetic of greed performing its silent sum.

"These," said he, tapping the vellum with a finger whose nail was bitten to the quick, "are not soundings. They are intervals of return — the recurrence, at fixed periods, of some phenomenon your cartographer's successor thought worth the recording. Currents repeat, sir. Tides repeat. And whatever repeats," he said, and here his voice dropped to that register men use when they wish a thing to sound like reason rather than appetite, "can be anticipated; and whatever can be anticipated can be — " He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to. I understood him to mean that the periodicities inscribed upon a two-hundred-year-old chart of soundings might, transposed with sufficient ingenuity into the register of his machine, disclose some hidden pulse in the modern markets themselves — as though the sea's old patience and the market's new frenzy were but two dialects of a single underlying language, and the forgotten map in my grand-uncle's attic its oldest surviving grammar.

"""
I confess that in that moment I felt neither the flaneur's idle curiosity that had first drawn me to the vellum, nor the scholar's dispassionate wish to trace its provenance, but something closer to the cold apprehension a man feels upon discovering that a door he had thought merely decorative opens, in fact, upon a stair; for it seemed to me, standing in that low attic with the dust of a century disturbed about our feet, that we had between us uncovered not a curiosity but a mechanism — and that mechanisms, once discovered, have a way of insisting upon their own completion.
"""

"""
And it was in fulfillment of that very insistence, I think, that Kray took the vellum from me before I had properly resolved to give it, and for the better part of a fortnight I did not see it again, nor did I greatly wish to, for I had begun to entertain toward the thing a species of aversion not unlike that which a man feels toward a wound he has been advised not to probe; but on the fifteenth evening he summoned me down to the locked room with a note so brief and so oddly formal — come and see what the dead man knew — that I could no more have declined it than a somnambulist can decline the moon. I found him seated before the terminal in the blue and bloodless light of its many small lamps, the map itself pinned flat beneath a sheet of glass at his elbow like a specimen awaiting dissection, and he did not turn his head as I entered but only lifted one hand and beckoned me nearer to the screen, upon which there scrolled, in a green so cold it seemed to me the color of something submerged, column after column of figures that I understood, dimly, to represent the pulse of markets three continents distant, though what I understood at once and with a completeness that left no room for subs

"You will observe," said Kray, and his voice had in it a dryness, a thinness, as of a man reciting a proof he no longer entirely trusts, "that I have done nothing but feed the old figures to the machine as periodicities — nothing more; I made no claim upon their meaning; I asked only whether the modern instruments would recognize, in the frenzy of the present hour, an order that the sea had already rehearsed a hundred years before us. And they have recognized it, sir. They have recognized it with a fidelity that I confess I did not anticipate, and did not, I think, desire." He turned to me then, and I saw that his countenance, which upon our first examination of the chart had worn the visible arithmetic of greed, wore now something nearer its inverse — a sum from which all profit had been subtracted, leaving only the cold residue of the operation itself; for the intervals, he explained, in a manner increasingly disjointed, increasingly parenthetical, as though the explaining cost him something he could ill spare, did not mark the recurrence of favorable tides at all, but the recurrence, with a periodicity so exact as to admit no chance reading, of catastrophic contraction — of markets emptying themselves as a harbor empties at the ebb, and emptying always, he said, at intervals that corresponded, hour for hour, to the intervals ticked off upon the margin of a chart drawn by a man who had, my own family's records would afterward confirm, gone down with his own ship in the very waters the chart depicted, on a date that the second hand's numerals, once resolved against the calendar, named with a precision no coincidence has ever, in my experience, been generous enough to supply.

I will not pretend to you that I received this intelligence with the composure proper to a rational being; I felt, rather, the blood withdraw from my extremities by a process as measurable as any tide, a coldness beginning at the fingertips and mounting, with what seemed a deliberate and unhurried patience, toward the chest, while my eyes remained fixed upon the green figures scrolling ever downward upon the screen, downward past thresholds that Kray's own instruments, I understood from his suddenly rapid and shallow breathing, had never before been permitted to cross; and it was at the precise moment when the numerals reached a configuration matching — matching, I say, not approximately but to the decimal — the last recorded interval upon the vellum, that the terminal's hum, which had been to my ear so constant a presence in that room as to have become inaudible, ceased.

It ceased as a heart ceases: not gradually, but at once, mid-beat, leaving behind it a silence so absolute that I heard, for the first time, the small tickings of Kray's own watch upon his wrist, and beneath that, or so my disordered fancy insisted, the more distant sound of water finding its level. Kray did not move. His eyes, when at last I brought myself to look into them, were vacant in expression, and regarded only the wall, and the screen before him held, unmoving, a single figure, blank, absolute, and terminal, while beneath the glass at his elbow the old vellum lay exactly as it had lain for a hundred years, indifferent, patient, and, I could not persuade myself otherwise, entirely satisfied.