Jim Morgan and the Pirates of the Black Skull

by James Raney

  “Are those me underclothes again, ya’ blasted sea-Ratts? I told ye ‘afore I would take the three of ye at once and knock yer senseless heads together like the brainless stones they be! Poseidon be merciful!” MacGuffy roared. His old, wrinkly face screwed up like a furious toad’s. Jim almost felt sorry for the former pirate, but he couldn’t help laugh as his friends scampered off the boat and passed MacGuffy on the pier, chortling and shouting at the top of their lungs.

  “Only one more day, MacGuffy,” Jim said happily, hopping off the boat. “Then you can go back to peace and quiet again, I promise.”

  “Aye, I’d almost forgotten what peace and quiet be like!” MacGuffy replied, his hands on his hips, glaring wickedly at the boys taunting him from the lighthouse steps. “Tired of me old lighthouse are ye, young Morgan?” MacGuffy said. Jim thought he heard a trace of sadness on the old man’s voice. He even felt a bit of it in his own chest.

  Jim’s favorite part about living at the lighthouse had been the days MacGuffy spent teaching him how to sail the little boat in the bay. But Jim’s time there was finally drawing to a close. Only a few days before, a letter had arrived from the town of Rye. Jim’s wicked Aunt Margarita was finally to be arrested for her crimes. Ever since she betrayed Jim’s father to his enemies, the Cromiers, Aunt Margarita had been living opulently off of the Morgan family fortune. But no longer. Morgan Manor was to be returned to Jim. At long last he was going home. Jim smiled at the thought. Even so, he would miss the lighthouse. He would miss MacGuffy.

  “You know I love the lighthouse, MacGuffy.” Jim said. “You never really had to let us stay, did you? But you did. You taught us how to swim and how to fish and how to sail. I’ll never forget any of it. I promise.”

  “Well, what kind o’ pirate’d I be if I’d let the old Count Cromier have ye, eh? Asides, twas good for old MacGuffy to have some company for a time, it was.”

  “You could still come with us,” Jim said. The day the message had come, Jim had offered MacGuffy to come live at Morgan Manor, to continue teaching him about the sea and sailing and the stars. But the old man had declined then and declined again now.

  “Nay, lad,” MacGuffy said, looking past Jim and out over the sea. “Truth be told, this lighthouse ain’t my home neither and it never were. The sea is my home, boy, the only home I’ll ever have. Remember this, young Morgan.” MacGuffy’s good eye never left the ocean. “Lands and titles’ll all pass on to others the very day a man dies – but his scars, his tales, and his great deeds in the storms o’ the sea belong to him forever. Aye, they do.”

  Jim regarded the old man for a long moment, still staring over the waves and perhaps daydreaming of some long forgotten adventure. Jim felt sorry for MacGuffy at times like this, for the old man had never had a place to which he belonged. But Jim knew for himself that he belonged at Morgan Manor. He was certain that he was meant to be the next Lord Morgan, like his father before him.

  But for the second time that day, Jim was more wrong than he could possibly know.

  TWO

  ight fell over the grassy hill, where the lighthouse stood watch over the bay. Inside the tall white tower, Jim Morgan was climbing the stairs for bed. His room, if it could even be called such, was barely a closet with a hammock stretched between two walls. Small as the room was, it at least had a little window that faced the sea. On warm nights, Jim would leave it open and let the ocean breeze and the rhythm of rushing waves lull him to sleep. Those nights he would dream of the day he would go home – dream of tomorrow. So it was that evening, and Jim opened his window to lean out into the moonlight.

  From the floor below he heard the Ratts getting ready for bed. George was delivering his nightly sermon to his brothers. He railed on about how they would lose their pickpocketing skills if they gave up taking some real practice. He also added that the nice thing about having lived in a cellar beneath a shoe factory had been that they were never forced to do laundry or scrub floors all afternoon, which had been their punishment for getting into MacGuffy’s underthings.

  After a long moment at the window, Jim retreated back into his room and sat on the edge of his hammock. From under his pillow he withdrew a small, wooden box, an ornate drawing of a trident and a pearl carved upon the lid. Jim pushed with his toes on the rough floorboards to swing slowly back and forth on the hammock. Then he opened the box.

  Beneath the lid was a delicate necklace, charmed with a silver shell, and also a folded piece of yellowed parchment. In all the world, the contents within the box were Jim’s most valued possessions. They were all that was left to him of his father, who had been poisoned by the treacherous Cromiers, and his mother, who had died when Jim was but a baby. He ran his fingers over the smooth rounds and perfect ridges of the shell charm. Then he withdrew the parchment and took it back to the window where he knelt down beside the sill.

  Jim unfolded the page slowly and carefully so as not to tear the paper, and found the letters of his father’s script faint and faded on the page. As he did each night before bed, Jim held the page out beneath the moonlight. Like a sharp breath on dying coals, blue light sparked to life through each and every pen stroke, the words waking as though only just written in their enchanted ink beneath his father’s quill. Jim read the letter, pretending to hear his father’s voice as he did.

  “Does the letter say the same thing every time?” Lacey’s voice said from the stairs. Jim turned to find her standing at the entry to his little room in her nightgown, the worn leather book of stars in her hands.

  “The way you read your book, you would think it certainly didn’t, wouldn’t you?” Jim said, hastily standing. He quickly folded the letter and jammed it back into the box. His ears were burning just a little at the edges.

  “I wasn’t making fun, Jim,” Lacey replied, her own cheeks flushing a bit. “I’m quite serious, you know.” She stepped inside the room and came to sit on the hammock, where Jim joined her, reopening the box just a bit to peek once more at the letter inside.

  “Of course it never says anything different, Lacey. My father only wrote the one note. It was all he had time to do.”

  “But it is a magic letter, isn’t it?” Lacey asked in a whisper. She peered warily at the box, as though some sorcery may even have been at work that very moment. “I would think a magic letter could do all sorts of things if it wanted to - and have all sorts of secrets - don’t you?”

  “I suppose it might,” Jim replied with a shrug. To Jim, words that hid in his father’s note from all but moonlight were magic enough.

  “Is your necklace magic as well?”

  “I don’t think so.” Jim took it out of the box and handed it to Lacey, who turned it over carefully in her fingers. “My father used to wear it all the time. He said it belonged to my mother.”

  “Why don’t you wear it, Jim? I think it would look fetching on you.” Lacey opened the chain and moved to loop it around Jim’s neck. But Jim caught it in his hand and simply laid it back in the box, shutting the lid with a soft tap.

  “Not yet, Lacey. Maybe never. I don’t know.” Lacey nodded slowly, looking down and playing with the tattered cover of her book. After a moment though, she smiled again and straightened herself up on the hammock, putting on her best, noble airs. “I think you shall make a fine Lord,” she said. Then she laughed at Jim’s blushing ears. “Lord Jim Morgan, greatest Lord of them all. And do you know how I know for certain? The stars tell me so!” Lacey held up her book before her face and peered over the cover mysteriously at Jim. “They tell me that tomorrow is the start of a new adventure for us!”

  “Oh really?” Jim said. “Do they tell you how long it will take for George and the others to ruin their new clothes?”

  Lacey, who was smart enough to know when the boys were teasing, shook her head and gave Jim a light punch on his shoulder. “Goodnight Jim Morgan,” she said. “You’ll see tomorrow. A great journey will begin.” Then Lacey tiptoed out of the room and went down the stairs to her little r
oom across from the Ratts’.

  “Goodnight, Lacey,” Jim called after her.

  Jim was hardly sure that stars and constellations meant anything more than lights and pictures in the sky. In any event, tomorrow was indeed going to be the best day of his life. He smiled at the thought and breathed deeply of the ocean air. In only a matter of hours his little box would sit on a proper nightstand beside a proper bed in a proper home, where he, his friends, and his remaining possessions truly belonged. Avoiding the bother of changing into nightclothes, Jim simply kicked off his shoes, hung his jacket and hat on a rusty nail, and blew out his lantern. He leaned back into his hammock and in a few gentle swings fell effortlessly to sleep.

  The wind and the waves rushed the little sailboat toward the pristine shores of a white sand beach. Jim Morgan stood at the prow, breeches rolled up over his knees. His hands were full with a wooden sword and a rope for the sail, tools for dream adventures too glorious and epic to exist anywhere but a young boy’s mind. Jim’s smile stretched wide over his face and he crowed at the top of his lungs.

  Standing tall on the green hill beyond the beach, Morgan Manor came into view. Her tall iron gates were stanchioned with the bold letter M. Her orchards and gardens stretched all the way to the dark forest beyond. Home, Jim thought. He was finally sailing home. He raised his wooden sword once more and shouted with joy into the air. But no sooner had his call faded than the warm sea breeze turned cold. It stole the cry from Jim’s lips and pricked his cheeks with icy needles. A shiver crawled down his back as he turned to look behind him.

  Dark clouds, blacker than burnt paper, boiled on the horizon. They bled across the sky like a spreading stain. Lightning flicked forked tongues at the cloud’s edges, bursting in purple flashes. Crimson tendrils wormed through the cracks and folds, rivulets of burning red in the dark.

  It was a storm - yet this was no mere summer squall. As Jim watched the unfolding thunderheads roll toward the bay, he knew in his heart that there was something unnatural about them. Jim had seen too much magic to miss its smell, or its feel.

  Thunder clapped like a door blown open by the wind, and Jim flinched in his boat. The sea quaked and frothed. Black clouds, rimmed with red, devoured the sky and the sun, swallowing them whole. Darkness descended upon the bay and a cold wind chilled Jim to the bone. But a cold, icier still, gripped him when he turned about in his boat. He found himself no longer alone.

  A man’s form melted from the shadows at the back of the boat. A black coat flapped in the rising wind. A pitch hat hid the man’s face in darkness. A steel cutlass, glowing red as the storm clouds above, burned in the man’s hand. Jim’s heart beat like a hammer in his chest. His legs quivered beneath him. The dark man raised his blade and leveled it at Jim’s chest. Then he swung it out over the raging sea, toward the storm. Jim followed the sword to the clouds. A flurry of lightning bolts blazed within the tempest. The lightning formed a face in the blackness.

  The face of a skull in the storm.

  “Jim Morgan,” the face called with a voice of thunder. “Jim Morgan!”

  Jim flew awake. Cold sweat had beaded upon his brow. His shirt clung tight to his damp chest. Stuck for a moment in the tight space between awake and asleep, Jim frantically searched the room for the man in black and the crimson storm. Yet all he found was his small space in the lighthouse, window open, and hammock swaying back and forth beneath him.

  Footfalls on the wooden steps outside Jim’s door creaked into his room and MacGuffy appeared. He held a candleholder in one gnarled finger. The whispering flame cast a wavering yellow over his old, scarred face.

  “Heard ya moanin’ and groanin’ from all the way down the stairs, lad,” MacGuffy said shortly, searching the room with his lone eye. “Be ye all right, young Morgan?” Jim sat up and wiped the sweat from his face with the back of his hand.

  “I think so, MacGuffy. Just a bad dream, that’s all.”

  “Yer too old for nightmares, boy,” MacGuffy replied gruffly. He shook his head and lowered the candle a bit, as if a bit disappointed no real danger lurked about to confront. “Conquer yer wakin’ fears and ye’ll conquer the sleepin’ ones as well, or so me pappy told me once. Now what was it ye were dreamin’? Spiders? Dragons? Ghosts? Girls?” MacGuffy laughed with a gravelly sound more akin to coughing or barking. But Jim only furrowed his brow, licking the sweat from his upper lip, trying with great effort to hold the dream in his mind like water in his hands.

  “It was a storm. A crimson storm. It covered the sky and had a face…a skull face in the clouds.” MacGuffy’s rough chortle caught in his throat. His ruined smile faltered. For a long moment the old pirate stood silent and still in the doorway, looking at Jim over the whispering candle flame with his one remaining eye.

  “A red storm?”

  “Yes, a crimson storm. And the storm knew my name.”

  MacGuffy stood like a statue for a long time, studying Jim intently. But after a while the pirate’s smile once more found its way back onto his face, forced though it seemed to Jim.

  “Well, twas only a dream, my boy. Mayhaps brought about by me stern lesson on sailin’, now that I be thinkin’ about it.”

  “Perhaps,” Jim said. He hardly thought that was the case at all, especially not after what he had seen in the waters that afternoon. But MacGuffy carried on as though the matter had been settled.

  “Well then, to sleep with you, lad. Tomorrow be a long day and we be settin’ out bright and early with the dawn.” MacGuffy nodded sharply and turned to climb the stairs to the lamphouse. Jim lay back in his hammock to try and return to sleep when the candlelight brightened once more in the doorway and MacGuffy reappeared. The old salt seemed suddenly so much older and worn to Jim. The flame-drawn shadows carved deep into the crevices on MacGuffy’s face.

  “Jim, I know I be not much more than an old salt o’ the sea. And I know youth ne’er listens to age, nor never has. It was so even with me and me pappy when I was but a sea pup like yerself. But hear me this one time if ye’ve heard me at all. Storms come in this life, boy. Sure as the sun n’ the moon, n’ birth n’ death, storms’ll come. Not all of them be made o’ wind and rain. Me old sailin’ master used to say to me that ye don’t know if a swabby be a sailor or no till ye see him handle the wheel in a storm. He was right about that. But I say that ye don’t know if a boy be a man or no til ye see him handle hisself in the storms o’ this life. Do ye understand me, Jim?”

  Jim stared at MacGuffy through the candle flame. “I think so, MacGuffy.”

  “Good,” said the old pirate. “Then we’ll be seein’ ye in the mornin’ to take ye back home, and a joyous day I’m sure ‘twill be. Goodnight, young Morgan.”

  “Goodnight, MacGuffy,” Jim replied. This time he heard the old man creak his way all the way up the steps to the lamp room above. Jim closed his eyes, but it was a long time before he fell asleep again.

  THREE

  he next morning, Jim woke before anyone else in the house, even old MacGuffy, who rarely rose after the sun. Jim leapt from the hammock, his nightmare forgotten for the moment and the joy of this long-awaited day bursting within his chest. Down the stairs he rushed to boil a few pots of water, enough for him and even the Ratts to have a bath in the tub behind the lighthouse.

  After scrubbing himself cleaner than he had been in at least a year, Jim ran back to his room, dripping wet. He tugged on a pair of breeches and socks, and pulled on a bright white shirt with a cream-colored waistcoat. He also slid on a pair of new shoes and finished dressing with a blue riding coat and tricorn hat. These were nothing like the costly fashions from Austria and France that Aunt Margarita used to have tailored for Jim, but they were the best clothes he had worn since running away from home that stormy night so long ago. They would more than do for this most marvelous of days.

  The Brothers Ratt were waiting for Jim in the kitchen as he came down the stairs. They stood all in a row, hands on their lapels and looking every bit the dapper, noble-born
boys they were absolutely not. The devilish smirks upon their faces told Jim at once how obscenely taken the three thieves were with their new look.

  “Ah, Lord Morgan, you’ve arrived at last,” George said tiredly. He sauntered forward, arching one eyebrow and yawning into the back of his hand in a perfect imitation of the nobles whose pockets he’d once picked in London. “In honor of this glorious occasion, sire, we, the humble Clan of the Ratt, bid you good day.”

  The three brothers turned as one on their heels, flipped up the tails of their coats, and bowed with their nobly dressed rears in a perfect row toward Jim. Together they shouted in unison: “We salute you, sire!”

  “Knock that off, you blockheads!” Jim shouted. He laughed out loud and leapt from the stairs to deliver a swift punt to the seat of George’s upturned pants.

  “Oy! That was a bit unlordly of you, don’t you think, Jim?” George said, gingerly rubbing one set of cheeks and the irrepressible Ratt smile still stretched across the others.

  “And to have leapt down the stairs in such a manner?” Peter added, shaking his head and clucking his tongue in feigned shock and dismay. “You may have twisted your noble ankle, milord!”

  “My lord!” Paul shouted, falling to his knees before Jim. “I postulate myself at your feet!”

  “No you don’t!” Jim smushed Paul’s hat down over his head and slugged Peter in the shoulder. “And besides…” he was about to correct Paul, but Peter cut him off.

  “The word is prostrate, Paul,” Peter said, shaking his head as though quite disappointed.

  “Well done, Peter,” Jim said, impressed.

  “Well, I have been doin’ a bit of readin’, haven’t I?”

  “Yes, we know,” Paul and George replied together, giving Peter the snootiest of looks they could muster.

  “It’s so BO-ring,” George added. “And keep gettin’ your nose stuck in all them books all day, you’ll forget your lock pickin’, Peter, which is the really the only thing you know of any use, innit?”