Wandering ghostsCrawford, F. Marion (Francis Marion)
Science
Wandering ghosts
Crawford, F. Marion (Francis Marion)
American fiction; Ghost stories; Horror tales; Short stories
There's not much more to tell about the _Helen B. Jackson_, so far as I
am concerned. We were more like a shipload of lunatics than anything
else when we ran in under Morro Castle and anchored in Havana. The cook
had brain fever, and was raving mad in his delirium; and the rest of the
men weren't far from the same state. The last three or four days had
been awful, and we had been as near to having a mutiny on board as I
ever want to be. The men didn't want to hurt anybody; but they wanted to
get away out of that ship, if they had to swim for it; to get away from
that whistling, from that dead shipmate who had come back, and who
filled the ship with his unseen self! I know that if the Old Man and I
hadn't kept a sharp lookout, the men would have put a boat over quietly
on one of those calm nights, and pulled away, leaving the captain and
me and the mad cook to work the schooner into harbour. We should have
done it somehow, of course, for we hadn't far to run if we could get a
breeze; and once or twice I found myself wishing that the crew were
really gone, for the awful state of fright in which they lived was
beginning to work on me too. You see I partly believed and partly
didn't; but, anyhow, I didn't mean to let the thing get the better of
me, whatever it was. I turned crusty, too, and kept the men at work on
all sorts of jobs, and drove them to it until they wished I was
overboard, too. It wasn't that the Old Man and I were trying to drive
them to desert without their pay, as I am sorry to say a good many
skippers and mates do, even now. Captain Hackstaff was as straight as a
string, and I didn't mean those poor fellows should be cheated out of a
single cent; and I didn't blame them for wanting to leave the ship, but
it seemed to me that the only chance to keep everybody sane through
those last days was to work the men till they dropped. When they were
dead tired they slept a little, and forgot the thing until they had to
tumble up on deck and face it again. That was a good many years ago. Do
you believe that I can't hear "Nancy Lee" now, without feeling cold down
my back? For I heard it, too, now and then, after the man had explained
why he was always looking over his shoulder. Perhaps it was
imagination. I don't know. When I look back it seems to me that I only
remember a long fight against something I couldn't see, against an
appalling presence, against something worse than cholera or Yellow Jack
or the plague--and, goodness knows, the mildest of them is bad enough
when it breaks out at sea. The men got as white as chalk, and wouldn't
go about decks alone at night, no matter what I said to them. With the
cook raving in his bunk, the forecastle would have been a perfect hell,
and there wasn't a spare cabin on board. There never is on a
fore-and-after. So I put him into mine, and he was more quiet there, and
at last fell into a sort of stupor as if he were going to die. I don't
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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