Read by Stephen Butterton (third story in podcast, here)
The pirates are thirteen days out of Port Royal, having drunk themselves liquid and swived themselves black-eyed on the last merchantman’s bullion, the dawn they sight the derelict. It's the first vessel in doldrum-drifting weeks. But the tropic sun’s a flaring torch, half-quenched in the horizon, by the time the Siren draws near. The stranger ship’s silhouette against the red-gashed sky is still as a gibbeted corpse.
The crew’s restless and underfed; dogs too-long chained. Captain Vittery prays for bounty, leaving First Mate Pereira aboard to keep order: he’d trust Pereira, a grizzled Portugee, with his life or death, whichever came uppermost.
The boarding-party rows over in the jolly-boat. Ten feet off, Vittery calls halt: high on her starboard flank is her faded name: Day Dreamer. An odd, whimsical appellation, smacking more of a pleasure-craft than a three-masted schooner. He’s brought Bartolo, the hulking Second Mate, redheaded Logan the bosun, Ashoy the Lascar and gruff Svensson: his best men by a league. Mickey the cabin-boy comes too, for luck. Wanted to show the colour of his courage.
Hemp-creak and wave-wash; otherwise, dead-quiet. A knotted rope trails down the hull, an open invitation. He’d thought she’d be a wreck, scoured by salt and storm, sides barnacled, ropes ragged. But her sails are full-rigged, and her wheel fixed, just as if the navigator had stepped belowdecks for dinner.
“I am Captain Vittery of the buccaneer-ship Siren: we’re eighty men and forty cannon, (only a slight exaggeration both ways) “hungry and bloody. Do ye yield?”
Nothing. Svensson’s flame-blue eyes glitter: Bartolo cracks scarred knuckles. They’re keen as wolves to hunt or fight. Time to turn them loose.
Vittery grins. “We gave her a fair chance.”
Instantly Svensson swarms up the climbing-rope, followed by the rest. Mickey’s last, eyes gleaming stark white as he grips his little dagger in his teeth.
Boarded, the ship feels empty as a plundered chest: the deck’s a wooden desert beneath the moon. Easy pickings; no resistance. But the lads are wary, alert: pistols cocked, cutlasses drawn. He knows what they’re thinking.
Ghost-ship.
Clapping a beringed hand to his good eye, the Captain squints about blindly with his pearl one. He’s that Cornish bilge-rat Oren Saint to thank for this loss: scorning an eye-patch, Vittery plucked a vast pearl from the next booty seized and pushed it into his hollow socket. The crew fear the bend of his oyster’s eye more than his real one. At night, between hammocks, they whisper it sees the dead.
“What’s the matter, lads?” he cries. “Can’t see no ghosts!”
Nervous laughter stutters to silence. Mist rises from black water. The quicker they’re off this brig, the better.
“Scour it, bilges to binnacle!” Vittery shouts, striding with forged assurance towards the captain’s cabin. Any loot to be had’ll lie there. Behind him, the boarding-party scatters.
He tosses bunk and drawers, map-chests and cabinets. No gold, no scrip, no plate: barren as a mermaid’s teat. On the mahogany desk lie compasses, map, dial, astrolabe. Then, his practised pirate’s eye spies a hidden drawer: within, the ship’s log.
The last entry’s two days back – but the handwriting’s crabbed and blotched, in an unfamiliar language. A foreign ship, blown off-course? Yet, till lately, she’d at least one aboard. The vessel’s undamaged: no boats missing. But if she’s still crewed, why let her drift?
Only the numbers are readable: dates and quantities. He finds an inventory, perhaps: 20 of something. 34 something else. Below, 9’s crossed out: only 8 remain of … what? And the last item, whatever it is: but 1. Red-circled.
His good eye aches. Closing it, sparks pop against velvet-black in his left, blind socket. He grins: his pearl-eye don’t see ghosts, it sees fireworks. Tugging open the secret drawer to return the log, Vittery stops dead as Davy Jones, staring at the drawer-bottom as if at a ghost indeed.
A crudely-drawn compass-star, crossed by bones pointing the ordinal directions: northwest-southeast, northeast-southwest. Captain Saint’s sigil.
Saint’s been here. And, Vittery grudgingly admits, there never was a ship the vainglorious swab boarded that he didn’t take.
So where’s he now?
Outside, the deck’s clear: the men must’ve gone below. Vittery’s lamp lurches, flinging unsteady light as he clambers down. Mickey and Bartolo loom, swarthy shadows against charcoal-dark.
“Found anything?”
“Aye.” Bartolo flashes gold incisors, nodding at an alcove: it’s a shelved surgeon’s-nook, jumbled with bottles. Vittery uncorks one with his teeth, swigs, then spits.
“Laudanum!”
Pints of it. Day-Dreamer indeed. Yet this is no hospital ship. Vittery’s spine prickles and his socket aches. If there’s one thing he loathes more than Saint, it’s a mystery.
Logan sings out from the galley-kitchen. “No more’n a handful of biscuit here!”
The Captain curses: Siren’s rations are running short. They’d be nearing Ivory Coast by now, if ‘tweren’t for these God-blasted doldrums.
“Naught in the mess?”
“Lashings of rum!” The bosun appears, grinning, brandishing a keg. “34 o’ these.”
34: second item in the illegible log.
“Mickey?” barks Vittery. “Haul ‘em up above.” As Mickey springs to the task, Vittery looks around. “Where’s Svensson?”
“Gun-deck,” grunts Bartolo.
“Ashoy?”
“Searching the berths.” He points aft.
“ASHOY!” roars the Captain. The Lascar pants out of the leaping lamp-shadows.
“Cap’n?”
“Nosed any booty?”
Ashoy leads him among the hammocks: a silent forest of limply-swaying canvas. A loose pearl rolls about the rough boards. He spies another; then a glinting doubloon, then more. Treasure is scattered heedlessly about, as if dropped by children summoned from a game. A bangle swings from a hook; twixt hammocks, a gold chain’s strung like a warning-rope. Vittery snatches it: a necklace, same as any other.
Then why does this discarded treasure chill him so?
Descending to the gun-deck, Vittery’s lantern gleams on a double-row of enormous cannon, far too big for this middling ship.
“Ahoy! Svensson!”
No reply. But the Swede’s a bulldog, bellicose and bold. It’d take two ordinary men to put him down.
“Where’s the gunpowder?” asks the Mate.
“Svensson said stack it on deck.” Ashoy volunteers.
Vittery frowns “How many kegs?”
“A score.”
20 was in the logbook too. Twenty powder-kegs: nothing, for this arsenal. And where’s the cannon-balls? The Captain surveys the mighty guns: broad as tree-trunks, gape-mouthed, heavy and hollow as a sinner’s soul. What’s queerer, they’re turned inward instead of out the cannon-ports at the enemy.
“These ports are too small,” says Logan wonderingly, examining them. “The cannon’d never fit through.”
Vittery’s blood runs shark-cold. His pirate’s instinct shrieks that they should scarper like rats down a line, but he never yet left a ship empty-handed. He needs something to throw those muttering curs back aboard the Siren: some prize or plunder, or prisoners at least.
“There’s someone on this tub,” he growls. “And we’ll find ‘em.”
But the gun-deck’s bare as a gull’s rock: nowhere to hide. Then Bartolo, inspired, seizes a stoking-rod and plunges it in the nearest cannon. And instead of clanging iron, a soft thump.
“Christos,” mutters the Second Mate, disbelieving: “what’s here?”
He shoves till the stoking-rod will go no further. Then, tries to pull it out.
The rod won’t budge.
“It’s stuck,” says Ashoy. His sword’s unsheathed, his brow moist, even in the gun-deck’s dank chill.
“Stuck, my pickled arse!” snaps Bartolo. “Someone’s got ahold of it. Fetch a light!”
Mickey, running down from shifting the rum-kegs, shines his lantern high, shadows yawing. Logan’s pistol’s cocked and aimed at the yawning cannon-muzzle as Bartolo struggles to yank out the rod: whatever has hold of the other end is, unbelievably, as bear-strong as he.
Suddenly the rod’s released, flying out so hard it embeds in the low ceiling. Bartolo’s triumphant cry chokes as he’s dragged headfirst into the cannon. Half-off the ground, his wide shoulders wedge in its black mouth, gurgling screams muffled by his own body.
They leap, hauling at their shipmate like an anchor in a gale as he thrashes, a speared fish, shrieks stripping their eardrums. Suddenly he’s out, hitting the deck candle-white and limp; blood spewing from a deep gash in his throat.
And then what the Captain had thought shadows of the shifting lantern-light, begin crawling from the other cannon-mouths. Horribly elongated, ocean-black, yet still, somehow, shaped like men. Nightmare-men, thin and vulpine, moving more like animals than anything with a soul. Ratlike they swarm, squabbling to raven Bartolo’s still-steaming blood.
So that’s why Svensson didn’t answer.
As the things rise, sated, Vittery sees their hair is weed; their eyes black pearls. They are not ghosts, as their garish-red mouths attest. But they are surely dead.
They must sail by night, and sleep in the cannons by day, their leaden berths keeping out sun-rays better even than a coffin: hence her name, Day-Dreamer. By daytime she’s a drifting derelict, a floating trap to lure unwary rescuers or plunderers to feed her ghastly crew. That’s how the creatures sustain themselves at sea. That’s why there’s no food aboard.
Vittery recalls the log-entry: 9 scored out, leaving 8. Eight figures surround them: so one was lately lost. Meaning someone fought back, took one of the devils down. Hope rises bitter in the Captain’s throat.
The last number in the log. 1: circled red.
Herded to the brig, he smells for the first time the human stench of sweat and piss, and finally understands what there’s only one left of, and what all that laudanum’s for. Like sacks of hardtack, or barrels of salt-pork, he and his men are fresh stores for the long voyage.
He struggles violently as they drag open the brig-door, screaming to his crew to fight. And then he sees who lies in that stinking prison.
Shrunken and bloodless, Captain’s coat more rag than cloth, beard to his chest: still, his rival’s sea-green eyes glitter bright.
“Vittery,” croaks the withered prisoner. “They got you too?”
Christ alive. “Saint?” whispers the Captain as the iron-barred door clangs.
“Feast your eyes,” Saint says wearily. “Been drifting weeks in these damned doldrums. Living off me. Food’s gone, but they’re liberal with the laudanum. Eases the … process.” He coughs, spits thin blood. He’s studded with unhealed puncture-wounds; arms, neck, ankles, wrists. “I offered treasure for my freedom. All I had. They played with it like children, then tossed me in here. What’s gold to them? Their only currency is blood.”
*
The creatures gorge then, but sparingly, leaving Vittery’s men kitten-weak but alive. Still hungry, they drag the Captain on deck, pointing across the midnight water at the Siren. Shanties lilt from her soft-glowing portholes, almost close enough to touch.
He understands: bring them over, and he’ll go free. A Jack-Tar’s blood is good as a Captain’s to them. The only currency they know.
The Siren holds threescore fit, strong men: caged and drugged, they’ll feed the Day-Dreamer’s crew a year: more. Meanwhile, she’ll sail under darkness. Entrap another ship when Vittery’s men die. Grow ever stronger.
A blood bargain. He nods.
Four of the things flank him, four more behind. Vittery’s been in tight holes before, and wriggled out: but this time there’s no escape, not for any living man aboard.
It’s the only thing to do.
“Ahoy!” he bellows through cupped hands. “Pereira!”
There’s a stir aboard: watchmen run to the bows, straining their eyes against silvery dark. When Vittery sees the First Mate’s figure appear, for the first time since boyhood, the Captain prays. Just above the waterline, Siren’s sixteen port-cannon watch him like a row of black eyes.
“Pereira!” he yells again, before fear chokes his throat. “Stoke the cannon and fire on this ship!”
The Day-Dreamer’s deck is stacked with rum and powder: even one direct hit will blast them all to hell. But Pereira’s stone-still.
“God rot you man, move!” roars the Captain. “I said blow us out of the water!”
Savagely, Vittery rejoices as the first salvo thunders. The ship staggers, the fo'c'sle crumples and bursts into flame, and with his pearl eye and his living one, he watches the fireworks.
(c) Maria Kyle, 2022
Maria Kyle is an Oxford-based freelance editor and fiction writer whose short stories have appeared in anthologies published by the University of East Anglia and Arachne Press. Her work has been read in Hong Kong and translated into BSL for performance on YouTube by the amazing Marcel Hirshman, for Arachne. She’s a bit obsessed with pirates.
Stephen Butterton trained at the London Centre for Theatre Studies in 2002, finishing his training with a run in The Accrington Pals at Jermyn Street Theatre. He then spent time in Fringe Theatre and student film productions before leaving London in 2007. He now lives in Hastings, drowning in his day job as a vet. With very little time left over for acting and the written world, he is delighted to be taking to the stage once more for Liars' League!
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