Tales of Terror from the Black Ship (19 page)

‘It seems the storm has had its fill of us,’ said Thackeray. ‘My ship will return soon and I will be on my way, and you good folks will have the place to yourselves once more. I thank you kindly for your hospitality.’

‘You are very welcome,’ said Cathy. ‘I wish you would stay and meet our father.’

‘Mr Thackeray does not want to meet Father, Cathy,’ I said. ‘He must not keep his ship waiting – whatever ship that is.’

I said this last in a particular tone that I hoped would signify that I personally doubted that he was even a sailor and was more likely some sort of vagabond or con man.

‘Is there something you want to say, friend?’ he said.

‘Only that I still wonder at how you came to be here on such a night,’ I said. ‘The weather has been far too wild for any ship to reach the harbour. How is that you came ashore?’

‘I swam,’ he said.

‘Very funny,’ I said. ‘But I wonder why you do not wish to say.’

Thackeray closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. When he opened them he looked at Cathy, and when he spoke his voice was cool and quiet. The wind had dropped as if in response, and there seemed to be a hush of expectancy in the air.

‘Storms are part of a sailor’s life,’ said Thackeray, ‘and every mariner, from fisherman to admiral, has his mettle tested some time or other. Storms come and go. A ship like mine would not normally be troubled by them. But some storms are exceptionally powerful. Such was this one.’

I opened my mouth to interrupt him, but there was something about his expression that made me think better of it.

‘Perhaps I was distracted by the proximity to the place where I was born and spent my tender years. Perhaps I was thinking about Cathy and the life we might have had. Perhaps I was looking towards this very inn perched up here on the clifftop.’

He took a drink and slowly lowered the empty glass.

‘Whatever the cause,’ he said, ‘I did not see the wave that knocked me overboard.’

‘Goodness!’ said Cathy. ‘You were thrown into the sea in that storm? How did you survive, Mr Thackeray?’

‘Yes, Mr Thackeray,’ I said with a raised eyebrow. ‘How
did
you escape drowning?’

As usual he ignored me and addressed Cathy instead.

‘Time and again the rolling waves crashed over me and dragged me under, but each time I surfaced again. I saw the inn on the cliff and knew that I was heading towards the shore. In no time I was standing in the surf in the bay at the base of these cliffs.’

‘And how did you get from there to here?’ I asked. ‘The cliffs are high and treacherous.’

‘I climbed,’ he said calmly.

‘You climbed?’ I laughed.

‘Ethan!’ chided Cathy.

‘I cannot tell you what to believe,’ said Thackeray, sitting back in his chair. ‘I can only tell you what occurred.’

The storm was over now and there was a silence such as I had never known before. The sea had ceased its roar and the gulls their crying. Thackeray looked down at the table, his face veiled by shadow.

‘I knew this inn as a boy,’ he began, without looking up, ‘in happier days. I thought that I might see it one more time.’

He seemed so sincere in these reflections that I had to remind myself that he can only have been a few years my senior. If he had been here often enough to have grown sentimental about it, I would have remembered him. Cathy was clearly having the same difficulty, despite her desire to believe in this strange visitor.

‘But we would have been here when you came,’ she said. ‘I may have been so young as to have forgotten – though I am known for my good memory – but Ethan would surely have some recollection, what with you both being boys. Don’t you remember us?’

There was a pause. ‘It was all a long time ago,’ he said quietly, ‘as I have said. Such things and the memories of them are the wake a life leaves at its passing.’

I am a little ashamed to say I took some satisfaction in seeing Thackeray struggle to come up with any sensible explanation, and in seeing the look of disappointment that clearly showed on my sister’s face.

‘The storm has blown over, Cathy,’ I said. ‘Mr Thackeray should be going.’

‘Ethan is right, Miss Cathy,’ Thackeray said, standing up. ‘I must be on my way.’ He gave me another of his patronising smiles.

‘But surely your “ship” will be long gone, Mr Thackeray,’ I said, unable to resist the temptation to pick further at the fabric of his tale.

‘She will come for me soon enough,’ said Thackeray. ‘She is not a ship to leave her crew behind.’

He smiled and moved towards the door. But he had barely left the table when Cathy grabbed him by the arm, surprising me and herself by her boldness.

‘Oh please, Mr Thackeray,’ she said in her most pleading voice. ‘Please, please, please. One more story before you go.’

I sighed loudly, glaring at Cathy, but she paid no heed.

‘But I thought my last tale frightened you, Miss Cathy,’ said Thackeray.

‘So it did,’ she said with a giggle. ‘But I do so
love
to be frightened!’

Thackeray grinned and, to my dismay, sat back down.

‘Very well, then, Miss Cathy,’ he said. ‘One more story. Just for you.’

g

The Black Ship

The ship had been becalmed for more than two days. Not the merest breath of wind blew. The wide flat ocean stretched itself out to north and south, as black and limpid as a barrel of pitch under the cold night sky.

Now, to the city dweller and the farmer there is nothing especially ominous about a still night; far from it. The quiet means that their sleep will be untroubled and filled with peaceful dreaming.

But a sailing man is made of different stuff. He needs to feel the roll of the ship beneath his feet. He wants to hear the creak of taut rigging and the crackle of sailcloth filled to bursting.

Without wind in its canvas, without waves on the sea, a sailing ship becomes imprisoned, trapped as if by ice. That thing of beauty which can transport you to the four corners of the world becomes in windless weather a sad and useless beast.

Time was becalmed along with the ship, and to bide away those long hours of inactivity some of the mariners crowded into the captain’s cabin to tell tales, for no man loves a story more than a sailor, either in the telling or the hearing.

The men sat around the long map table. The low curved ceiling was ribbed with beams. A leaded window opened out on to the ship’s stern. A lantern was the only illumination in the cabin.

This lantern was the temporary property of each storyteller in turn, meaning that while the tale was in progress the audience sat silently focused on the grimly uplit face of the storyteller.

Jacob the cabin boy poured the captain another drink and stood back, listening to the stories. Gibson, a thick set and surly man hailing from the coast of Northumberland, was telling his tale, the lantern shining in his face, his gold tooth twinkling as he spoke.

‘We struck the reef at night,’ he growled. ‘The sound was something terrible to hear. The timbers cracked and split like they was being chewed by some great monster. As she was going down, a mighty wave slapped into her and broke her in two.

‘Men were falling into the sea every which way. You could hear them shouting and calling, their voices filled with that fear a sailor has in his voice when his ship is shot from under him.

‘The lucky men drowned there and then, God bless their souls, and died good sailors’ deaths, taken down deep to the ocean bed to rest alongside their ship.

‘Those of us afloat could now see there was an island beyond the reef. It was a long way off but it was a hope and I was a strong swimmer. But no sooner had I made my first move than I heard the screams.

‘Men ahead of me were being forced by the waves on to the reef as they swam. Some of you know those reefs. Those reefs are jagged with coral and spiked with shells. They can rip the flesh from you in minutes.

‘One after another of my shipmates was thrown against that infernal reef to be chewed and gnawed by it, while I, for the luck of being that much further out to sea, floated in the blackness, listening to their death throes.

‘As dawn came I could see the island clearly, but just as clearly I saw that I would never be able to reach it, for the reef spread out far beyond my view, barring my way.

‘Clearly, too, I could see the sport it had had with my shipmates. Floating between the reef and me was a sight no man should have to see: a stinking soup of flesh and blood that would have made a butcher puke.

‘The first fin flashed by me so close I felt the watery draft of the shark’s passing. Within minutes there were a dozen. I had thought all the crew were dead until the sharks began to feed, but then the screaming began again. Mercifully, it did not last long.

‘An old sea dog told me once that sharks come to movement like they come to blood and that the thing to do is to keep still. So that’s what I tried to do, though I had to tread water to stop myself drifting on to the reef.

‘The sharks gorged themselves and I saw smaller fish move in to pick the bones while sea birds flew in, squawking, dropping to the water and flying off with some vile piece of meat hanging from their beaks.

‘When they had had their fill, the sharks began to leave, their fins cutting through the water like black-sailed schooners. One after another they glided by. One even brushed against me as it did so and I felt the sleek leather of its skin against my hand.

‘The last shark turned to swim away and I was pleased to see that it took a route past me at some distance. But as it came level with me it hesitated and changed direction. It swam slowly past my legs. I saw its terrible soulless eye roll back and then it turned and took my ribs in its jaws and bit deep.

‘I could not cry out for the pain of it, but I somehow still had the wits to pull my knife from its sheath at my side and I stabbed the beast with all my strength. It rolled away with a piece of me in its jaws and my knife in its head.

‘Now I was bleeding and still had no way of getting to the island. Sooner or later the sharks would return; I only hoped I would be dead before they came.’

‘I swear those sharks take a bigger piece of you every time you tell this tale, Gibson,’ said Finch, a skinny Cornishman.

Most of the crew laughed and Gibson blushed a little and then laughed along with them. Jacob saw his chance and grabbed the lantern.

‘I’ve got a tale, if you’ve the guts to hear it!’

One or two of the sailors snorted and signalled to him to put the lantern back.

‘Come, lad,’ said one. ‘This is men’s business. Listen if you’ve a mind to, but leave the tale-telling to them as have a tale to tell. Besides, Gibson here hasn’t finished.’

‘Let the boy tell his tale,’ said Finch. ‘We know Gibson’s story well enough. We could do with a new one!’

‘Aye,’ said Gibson, slapping Jacob on the back. ‘Let him speak if wants to.’

Several sailors grumbled noisily, but Jacob grabbed a stool and sat himself down at the table. The lantern lit up his face and threw a giant’s shadow on the curved cabin ceiling.

‘Pipe down now, lads,’ said the captain. ‘As I see it, if young Jacob has a tale, then he’s as much right to tell it as any man here. Go on, son, sing out.’

‘Well,’ said Jacob, ‘the tale I tell was told to me by the cook on a brig I served on about a year past. This cook – Dawson was his name – he worked on a merchant ship sailing out of Bristol, bound for the Spice Islands.

‘The ship was a fine one with a good captain, and they made good time, rounding the Hope without a care. Then, when they thought they were safe and they were near their destination, a fearful storm blew up with waves like mountains with foaming white peaks.

‘The captain and crew they did their best, but the storm was too great. It downed the mainmast like it was a twig and crippled the ship, and then a mighty wave hit like an axe and broke her in two. All the crew were drowned.

‘All, that is, except this sea-cook, Dawson, who had managed to reach a piece of the mainmast and had held on for dear life throughout the raging of the storm.

‘When the storm ended, Dawson found himself afloat among the wreckage of his ship and the dead of the crew. He called out for survivors but no answer came.