Diaries / Professor Marrow’s Field Notebook
The expedition’s side of the hatch: five days of notes, sketches and growing suspicion of a brass crab.
Fiction. Legends, sightings and most of the crew are invented. The submarine is real.
Day 1
Set out at dawn with four colleagues, eleven notebooks and one harpoon, which nobody knows how to use. The monster was last reported off the Heads by a ferry passenger and a man who sells charts on the quay.
Mrs Gale’s chart cost more than the harpoon. I suspect it is drawn from memory. I have bought two.
Sketch: a squid, labelled “probably smaller than this”.
Day 2
The shape under the water is not a monster. It is a submarine, and it is very much bigger than it looked from the boat. A hatch opened. One of my colleagues said, “Should we?” and the rest of us were already inside.
The hatch closed behind us. A voice in a brass tube welcomed us aboard the Nautilus and asked whether anyone was wearing sandals.
Note: nobody was wearing sandals. Good.
Day 2, later
Captain Nemo exists. I had a whole paper ready proving he didn’t. He speaks only through the tubes, never in person, and seems to regard the failing of his submarine as something that happens to other people.
The gauges disagree. Several of them are pointing at the bit of the dial that is painted red. The air, the captain admits, is “not unlimited”.
Observe first. Panic second. (Underlined.)
Day 2, the crab
There is a brass crab aboard. It counted us at the hatch, clicked four times and seemed satisfied. Later it followed Tobias, our youngest, and sat under the chart table watching him eat a biscuit.
I have tried to sketch it three times. Each time it moved. I have labelled the sketch “do not trust”.
Barnacle, apparently. The captain says the name is not up for discussion.
Day 3
We surfaced. I will not write down how; the captain made us promise, and frankly I am not sure I could explain it. We worked as a team, which the captain says is the only way the Nautilus has ever been fixed.
Just before we rose, something passed the porthole. An eye, the size of a dinner table, looked in at us, blinked, and was gone. The captain said, “Ignore it. It wants attention.” I have decided to write a second paper.
Sketch: one enormous eye. Labelled “definitely bigger than the first sketch”.
— I. Marrow, Professor (Marine Phenomena), expedition leader
