THE MYSTERY OF THE GHOST SHIP
Two pirates stood on the bow of their little caravel, looking out at the large and looming ship in the distance. It was rudderless, the sails furled and the ship at the whims of the waves. They couldn't see anyone on board. It was a ghost ship, that's all they could say for sure. The first pirate passed his comrade the telescope so he could get a good long look too.
“Could be treasure,” he says, his voice gritty, his teeth old and falling out. “Who knows what one finds on a ship like that. What secrets do the dead keep?”
“Yarr,” the first responds, sliding a knife across a whetstone with a predatory glee. “But you do realize what else we might find there? Not the least of which may be, and I find it may not even be necessary to say this, but the possibility still stands ... ghosts!”
The other pirate exploded in laughter and punched his friend in the shoulder before giving him the telescope back and heading towards the rigging. “Of course, you wee baby,” he says as he begins to pull the rope and adjust the sails. “We'll keep an eye out for leprechauns and dragons while we're at it!”
With only one good eye the first pirate scowled. “You know fer a fact that dragons exist and ... well ... I haven't ever met a leprechaun, but it stands to reason!”
“Just shut up,” his friend said with a look of disappointment. “Get the men together, form a bording party. Bring along some salt and some crosses just in case the Devil 'imself be there too!”
~
A small group of about seven pirates climbed aboard the big ship. It looked completely abandoned, empty and fairly beat up. Who knows how long it was floating out here without a crew? The pirates looked around and began poking at things with their cutlasses and flintlock pistols drawn.
“Nothing o'er this way, sir!” shouts a group looking over the starboard side.
“Nay a thing on this side either, sir!” comes the response from the other side.
Whistling Jack was a subservient to a Pirate Queen many miles away. Opealon's patchwork of alliances between crews and monsters beneath the shadow of the sky islands above was always a tenuous and fractious political landscape. He had struggled to get to this point in his career and it was cautious and a constant willingness to bring back a little more coin to his queen that had got him here.
He looked around and narrowed his eyes. “There had better be something here, or you know who will be lookin' for our heads.”
The motley assembled group of sea bandits kept hunting. Jack sighed. He was behind his quotas on booty and he didn't look forward to his next tribute. He really hoped this turned out to be some sort of big score for him and his crew. They needed it.
“What was that!?” Jack shouted, turning his pistol around at something he saw from the corner of his eye. Something small and white had just flew towards ...
An open door that lead to the lower decks? It swung on its hinges, leading into darkness. Had he really seen something or was it just a trick of the light? In the sky the clouds and islands made shadows that could trick an old sea dog as his eyes betrayed him. Was it that or could it be?
His men came up behind him, weapons drawn and ready, but like their commander they couldn't see anything right away.
“What was it sir?” they asked expectantly.
Whistling Jack took a moment. He didn't want to look jumpy but he also wasn't sure that he had not seen something in the first place. Maybe he wasn't wrong. His instincts had rarely lead him into disaster before.
“I think I saw something,” Jack grunted. “Go in there and check it out.”
Three men drew their blades and started down the stairs. The rest stayed above deck, keeping an eye and out and continuing to look around. For a few minutes all they could hear was the creak of the wood as the men descended and then there was a long silence.
“I heard,” a pirate with a gaping hairlip said, his lisp having long grown on the nerves of his comrades and then having become second nature to them after that. “Every thirteen years Davy Jones lets a single dead pirate crew out of his locker to sail the surface and search for whatever treasures they left behind in life. Any living ships they come across along the way, well they send them to go tell Davy Jones how much they've found and ask for another thirteen years of plunder.”
“Ain't no Davy Jones,” a corpulent pirate with a bandana around his face and sallow jaundiced skin. “Only thing under the water are the Elder Things and the Lost City”
“Will you idiots quit yer jabbering before I--” Jack began to shout, only to be interrupted by a blood curdling scream from below the decks. It almost shook the rafters, and it had to be more than one of the men below.
Without hesitating, Jack went pistol first into the lower decks. “I'm coming,” he shouted. “What's happening.”
“Gh-gh-gh-gho-ghooooo--” came a distant response, cut off suddenly again by a blood-curdling scream. Jack looked at the three pirates who followed him into the darkness and swallowed hard. One of them lit a torch and they continued their descent in silence.
The lower decks were unlit, and they showed signs of a struggle. Broken chairs, smashed tables, discarded swords and shattered crockery. There were no bodies, no blood, and everything was as still as the grave.
Jack and his men entered what might have been a larger mess hall from the overturned dining table. There on the ground were the three men he had sent here. They were alive, but curled up into a fetal position, eyes closed, weeping.
Jack shook one around and looked at him. The despair in his crewmate's eyes was palpable, an overwhelming sense of sadness that exuded out of him even before he opened his mouth, his lip curling in between sobs, to exclaim; “I'm sorry, I'm a terrible pirate. I serve no purpose. I should throw myself overboard. At least then I could feed the sharks ...”
Jack looked in confusion. What had happened to this guy? He had seen him fight a lion with an arrow through his hand. This man wasn't afraid of anything. What had made him lose that confidence.
“Leave me alone,” another pirate on the floor bellowed. “I wish I would die and be reborn as algae!”
“Get up you fools,” one of the pirates who had followed Jack down here said. He kicked his crewmate, only to make him weep even deeper.
Jack was getting ready to add on to that admonition with a virulent tirade of abuse commanding his men to get up and straighten up or he really would make shark food out of the lot of them ... but then he saw something move in the shadows. He almost jumped out of his skin as he assured himself beyond a shadow of a doubt that what he saw was a small, smiling ghost.
He aimed and shot. His bullet caused a wood wall to burst into splinters but found no ghostly target. A distant giggle could be heard in the shadows.
“This place is HAUNTED!!” screamed one of the afflicted pirates. As if to make his point, a smiling little ghost then emerged from within the chest of the screaming man, smiling and waving before saying cryptically, distantly;
“Ne-ga-tive.”
At that point everything was screams in the darkness. The torch was dropped, more bullets were fired, swords clashed in the dark and nothing was for certain. The chaos continued until Jack and a single other pirate escaped from the doorway to the deck, shouting and scrambling to get to the surface.
“What the hell was--”
“Was that, it couldn't be but --”
“We need to get the heck off this boat, now!”
The two men jumped over board and onto their small boat they had ridden over to this ghost ship. It rocked violently as they landed and straightened themselves up before heading back to their ship, never stopping looking nervously over their shoulder. Neither hoped they saw a ghostly figure following them from that ship to theirs. No, they were already telling themselves that they hadn't even seen what they had thought they had seen.
They crawled up the rigging back to their boat, and only then began to catch their breath, heaving and gasping and searching their memories to separate truth from panicked fiction. What had they seen? Was it really ghosts?
“Horo horo horo” came a girlish giggle from beside them.
They looked up. The crew of their ship, everyone they had left behind, lay on the deck clutching their knees.
“I'm worse than dust,” said one in desperate misery.
“I'm worse than pond scum,” cried another between big ugly tears.
Between them all floated a female form. Her limbs were gangly, her feet pigeon toed. She wore a beautiful black frilly dress with pink fishnet stockings and arm coverings. She had a large black tophat with a pink rose on it atop a head of long, curled pink hair. Her boots were oversized and likewise pink. Around her swirled two ghosts, their smiling faces and blank stares the same as what they had seen on the other ship.
“Whistling Jack, I presume?” the floating girl said with a giggle.
The pirate pointed his gun, his eyes bulging with terror.
“What have you done to my men you FREAK!?” he shouted.
The girl covered her mouth and giggled her distinctive “horo horo horo” again. The ghosts around her added to her chorus of laughter, a haunting sound unlike anything the two standing pirates had ever heard. She looked at him with wide doll like eyes painted in black makeup and smiled a grin so frightening and cute it would stay with him for the rest of his life.
“I only showed them,” she said after her giggling subsided. “How to let go of all that foolish strength and embrace the negative.”
“Ne-ga-tive,” her ghost companions added with a swirl. “Ne-ga-tive.”
“Let them go or I put hot lead into your pink head, girly,” Jack said. He whistled, trying to recover a small amount of his fading confidence.
This was matched with more obnoxious giggling. All around her his men wailed in despair as she filled the deck with the eerie sound of her ghostly giggling.
Jack unloaded his gun into the girl. Though it looked like a flintlock pistol it was actually capable of firing semi-automatic rounds, a full clip of twelve. All twelve hit their mark, right into the girl's head and chest. Jack was a crack shot.
Unfortunately, not a one hurt her. They seemed to phase right through her. They didn't even stop her laughing. His subordinate ran, turning suddenly to jump overboard, as Jack stood transfixed and shocked at what he saw. The girl waved her hand her ghosts streaked through the air towards the two standing pirates. Jack made a move to dodge but the ghosts were two swift, one flying right through his heart.
His heart. Deep in that chest of his, Whistling Jack had faced down death a thousand times and never flinched. He was a veteran of a thousand sea battles and had obliterated every opponent who had stood against him. He was proud of his glory and had been awarded with this ship and crew by his queen for his prowess in combat and plunder. But this heart, once ablaze with pirate pride, felt cold for the first time. Felt dark for the first time.
He couldn't remember why he fought. He couldn't remember why he would fight, why he wouldn't just curl up into a ball and cry. He felt his body against his will coiling into the fetal position. He fell to his knees, the gravity of his misery spreading from his afflicted heart to every part of his body. He couldn't breathe, the sadness weighing him down in a way the old sea dog had never felt.
“I-I-” he struggled. He could see the pink haired woman floating weightlessly over him. “I ... I don't ... I don't .... deserve to live!”
She smiled. The ghosts beside her did the same. It was the last thing Whistling Jack remembered before everything went black.
(WC 2147)
Two pirates stood on the bow of their little caravel, looking out at the large and looming ship in the distance. It was rudderless, the sails furled and the ship at the whims of the waves. They couldn't see anyone on board. It was a ghost ship, that's all they could say for sure. The first pirate passed his comrade the telescope so he could get a good long look too.
“Could be treasure,” he says, his voice gritty, his teeth old and falling out. “Who knows what one finds on a ship like that. What secrets do the dead keep?”
“Yarr,” the first responds, sliding a knife across a whetstone with a predatory glee. “But you do realize what else we might find there? Not the least of which may be, and I find it may not even be necessary to say this, but the possibility still stands ... ghosts!”
The other pirate exploded in laughter and punched his friend in the shoulder before giving him the telescope back and heading towards the rigging. “Of course, you wee baby,” he says as he begins to pull the rope and adjust the sails. “We'll keep an eye out for leprechauns and dragons while we're at it!”
With only one good eye the first pirate scowled. “You know fer a fact that dragons exist and ... well ... I haven't ever met a leprechaun, but it stands to reason!”
“Just shut up,” his friend said with a look of disappointment. “Get the men together, form a bording party. Bring along some salt and some crosses just in case the Devil 'imself be there too!”
~
A small group of about seven pirates climbed aboard the big ship. It looked completely abandoned, empty and fairly beat up. Who knows how long it was floating out here without a crew? The pirates looked around and began poking at things with their cutlasses and flintlock pistols drawn.
“Nothing o'er this way, sir!” shouts a group looking over the starboard side.
“Nay a thing on this side either, sir!” comes the response from the other side.
Whistling Jack was a subservient to a Pirate Queen many miles away. Opealon's patchwork of alliances between crews and monsters beneath the shadow of the sky islands above was always a tenuous and fractious political landscape. He had struggled to get to this point in his career and it was cautious and a constant willingness to bring back a little more coin to his queen that had got him here.
He looked around and narrowed his eyes. “There had better be something here, or you know who will be lookin' for our heads.”
The motley assembled group of sea bandits kept hunting. Jack sighed. He was behind his quotas on booty and he didn't look forward to his next tribute. He really hoped this turned out to be some sort of big score for him and his crew. They needed it.
“What was that!?” Jack shouted, turning his pistol around at something he saw from the corner of his eye. Something small and white had just flew towards ...
An open door that lead to the lower decks? It swung on its hinges, leading into darkness. Had he really seen something or was it just a trick of the light? In the sky the clouds and islands made shadows that could trick an old sea dog as his eyes betrayed him. Was it that or could it be?
His men came up behind him, weapons drawn and ready, but like their commander they couldn't see anything right away.
“What was it sir?” they asked expectantly.
Whistling Jack took a moment. He didn't want to look jumpy but he also wasn't sure that he had not seen something in the first place. Maybe he wasn't wrong. His instincts had rarely lead him into disaster before.
“I think I saw something,” Jack grunted. “Go in there and check it out.”
Three men drew their blades and started down the stairs. The rest stayed above deck, keeping an eye and out and continuing to look around. For a few minutes all they could hear was the creak of the wood as the men descended and then there was a long silence.
“I heard,” a pirate with a gaping hairlip said, his lisp having long grown on the nerves of his comrades and then having become second nature to them after that. “Every thirteen years Davy Jones lets a single dead pirate crew out of his locker to sail the surface and search for whatever treasures they left behind in life. Any living ships they come across along the way, well they send them to go tell Davy Jones how much they've found and ask for another thirteen years of plunder.”
“Ain't no Davy Jones,” a corpulent pirate with a bandana around his face and sallow jaundiced skin. “Only thing under the water are the Elder Things and the Lost City”
“Will you idiots quit yer jabbering before I--” Jack began to shout, only to be interrupted by a blood curdling scream from below the decks. It almost shook the rafters, and it had to be more than one of the men below.
Without hesitating, Jack went pistol first into the lower decks. “I'm coming,” he shouted. “What's happening.”
“Gh-gh-gh-gho-ghooooo--” came a distant response, cut off suddenly again by a blood-curdling scream. Jack looked at the three pirates who followed him into the darkness and swallowed hard. One of them lit a torch and they continued their descent in silence.
The lower decks were unlit, and they showed signs of a struggle. Broken chairs, smashed tables, discarded swords and shattered crockery. There were no bodies, no blood, and everything was as still as the grave.
Jack and his men entered what might have been a larger mess hall from the overturned dining table. There on the ground were the three men he had sent here. They were alive, but curled up into a fetal position, eyes closed, weeping.
Jack shook one around and looked at him. The despair in his crewmate's eyes was palpable, an overwhelming sense of sadness that exuded out of him even before he opened his mouth, his lip curling in between sobs, to exclaim; “I'm sorry, I'm a terrible pirate. I serve no purpose. I should throw myself overboard. At least then I could feed the sharks ...”
Jack looked in confusion. What had happened to this guy? He had seen him fight a lion with an arrow through his hand. This man wasn't afraid of anything. What had made him lose that confidence.
“Leave me alone,” another pirate on the floor bellowed. “I wish I would die and be reborn as algae!”
“Get up you fools,” one of the pirates who had followed Jack down here said. He kicked his crewmate, only to make him weep even deeper.
Jack was getting ready to add on to that admonition with a virulent tirade of abuse commanding his men to get up and straighten up or he really would make shark food out of the lot of them ... but then he saw something move in the shadows. He almost jumped out of his skin as he assured himself beyond a shadow of a doubt that what he saw was a small, smiling ghost.
He aimed and shot. His bullet caused a wood wall to burst into splinters but found no ghostly target. A distant giggle could be heard in the shadows.
“This place is HAUNTED!!” screamed one of the afflicted pirates. As if to make his point, a smiling little ghost then emerged from within the chest of the screaming man, smiling and waving before saying cryptically, distantly;
“Ne-ga-tive.”
At that point everything was screams in the darkness. The torch was dropped, more bullets were fired, swords clashed in the dark and nothing was for certain. The chaos continued until Jack and a single other pirate escaped from the doorway to the deck, shouting and scrambling to get to the surface.
“What the hell was--”
“Was that, it couldn't be but --”
“We need to get the heck off this boat, now!”
The two men jumped over board and onto their small boat they had ridden over to this ghost ship. It rocked violently as they landed and straightened themselves up before heading back to their ship, never stopping looking nervously over their shoulder. Neither hoped they saw a ghostly figure following them from that ship to theirs. No, they were already telling themselves that they hadn't even seen what they had thought they had seen.
They crawled up the rigging back to their boat, and only then began to catch their breath, heaving and gasping and searching their memories to separate truth from panicked fiction. What had they seen? Was it really ghosts?
“Horo horo horo” came a girlish giggle from beside them.
They looked up. The crew of their ship, everyone they had left behind, lay on the deck clutching their knees.
“I'm worse than dust,” said one in desperate misery.
“I'm worse than pond scum,” cried another between big ugly tears.
Between them all floated a female form. Her limbs were gangly, her feet pigeon toed. She wore a beautiful black frilly dress with pink fishnet stockings and arm coverings. She had a large black tophat with a pink rose on it atop a head of long, curled pink hair. Her boots were oversized and likewise pink. Around her swirled two ghosts, their smiling faces and blank stares the same as what they had seen on the other ship.
“Whistling Jack, I presume?” the floating girl said with a giggle.
The pirate pointed his gun, his eyes bulging with terror.
“What have you done to my men you FREAK!?” he shouted.
The girl covered her mouth and giggled her distinctive “horo horo horo” again. The ghosts around her added to her chorus of laughter, a haunting sound unlike anything the two standing pirates had ever heard. She looked at him with wide doll like eyes painted in black makeup and smiled a grin so frightening and cute it would stay with him for the rest of his life.
“I only showed them,” she said after her giggling subsided. “How to let go of all that foolish strength and embrace the negative.”
“Ne-ga-tive,” her ghost companions added with a swirl. “Ne-ga-tive.”
“Let them go or I put hot lead into your pink head, girly,” Jack said. He whistled, trying to recover a small amount of his fading confidence.
This was matched with more obnoxious giggling. All around her his men wailed in despair as she filled the deck with the eerie sound of her ghostly giggling.
Jack unloaded his gun into the girl. Though it looked like a flintlock pistol it was actually capable of firing semi-automatic rounds, a full clip of twelve. All twelve hit their mark, right into the girl's head and chest. Jack was a crack shot.
Unfortunately, not a one hurt her. They seemed to phase right through her. They didn't even stop her laughing. His subordinate ran, turning suddenly to jump overboard, as Jack stood transfixed and shocked at what he saw. The girl waved her hand her ghosts streaked through the air towards the two standing pirates. Jack made a move to dodge but the ghosts were two swift, one flying right through his heart.
His heart. Deep in that chest of his, Whistling Jack had faced down death a thousand times and never flinched. He was a veteran of a thousand sea battles and had obliterated every opponent who had stood against him. He was proud of his glory and had been awarded with this ship and crew by his queen for his prowess in combat and plunder. But this heart, once ablaze with pirate pride, felt cold for the first time. Felt dark for the first time.
He couldn't remember why he fought. He couldn't remember why he would fight, why he wouldn't just curl up into a ball and cry. He felt his body against his will coiling into the fetal position. He fell to his knees, the gravity of his misery spreading from his afflicted heart to every part of his body. He couldn't breathe, the sadness weighing him down in a way the old sea dog had never felt.
“I-I-” he struggled. He could see the pink haired woman floating weightlessly over him. “I ... I don't ... I don't .... deserve to live!”
She smiled. The ghosts beside her did the same. It was the last thing Whistling Jack remembered before everything went black.
(WC 2147)
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