As Steve led their group on and Stefan followed with his, Gwen did something she never did before. She completely let down her armor and opened to the shadows at her back. Gwen turned off her flashlight and looked down at her hands. She saw the blue sparks flicker on her palms and across the back of her hands and she felt a distinct pulse, not the zap of a static charge, but a thrumming, humming beat that radiated out from the center of her palms. To her left the grey haired woman walked, to her right the man with one arm. She knew Stefan was immediately behind her. It wasn’t time yet. The next room would be a good place to start.
Up ahead Steve and Scotty wrestled with a warped white door that wasn’t locked but stuck fast.
“Can we get some light here?” came Lou’s voice nearby.
Gwen turned her light on the trio, all hunched trying to free Crystal’s sleeve where it became caught on a nail in the wall. Quick, Gwen thought, how many ghosthunters does it take to unsnag a sleeve? She chuckled, flickering her light on where the group stood, just at the end of the room, before a strange juncture, where the wall abruptly ceased and the room recessed back into darkness. Crystal must have been walking along the wall, running her hands over the distorted and decaying lattice and exposed brick. The walls in the attic weren’t finished with plaster or paint, but seemed to be thick masses of wood and brickwork. Some were bare, latticework frames. Crystal walked a wall that was a combination of both. The narrow band of brickwork was most likely a chimney. Just past where the trio stood was a gaping maw of black space. Despite the complaints from the trio about not being able to see, Gwen shone her light into the dark, but all she saw was a circle of light. At the edge of the room was a small, two foot high wall delineating between the room they stood in and the darkness beyond. She carefully walked across the loose planks to the edge, deftly stepping over a pile of ancient, shattered light-bulbs and what looked like a warped, burned baking tray.
Turning around, Scotty and Steve were still tackling the stuck door. Stefan and his companions stood in the center of the room. Gwen saw a few more had stepped out of the shadows in the hallway to make themselves seen more distinctly. Gwen did not need much light to see them because, to her mind, they all had an internal light. It wasn’t that they glowed, but for her they seemed much brighter and more distinct then the live people in the room.
A young woman stood beside Stefan. She was the picture perfect Gibson Girl: fine golden brown hair in long curls worn loose and cascading down to touch her wasp waist, a white high necked blouse centered with a delicate cameo, a grey skirt and on her head, a petite straw hat sporting a grey silk band. She was putting on a pair of grey gloves and smiling with deep humor. Perhaps she found the trio’s fumbling with the nail and sleeve as pathetic as Gwen did. Beside her stood a tall boy seeming to barely have reached manhood. To say he was twenty would have been overreaching the mark. His hair was a vivid red-gold. He was fairly good looking with long sideburns in a slim fitting brown suit. In one long hand he held a rust colored bowler hat. The other reached out to link arms with grey skirted lady. He bowed to Gwen and she curtsied briefly. But she dropped her arm from the young man, to back up slightly. A man stood behind her, of a height to hers, and Gwen saw that the girl pressed her body against his in a way that was rather unseemly. The young boy with the bowler hat seemed enraged, threw his hat down and stormed off to get lost in the crown of spirits back toward the hallway.
The handsome man with the pockmarked face stepped forward. He had been the man standing behind the Gibson Girl. As he stepped around the woman, their fingertips brushed lightly and he kissed her neck before he turned to nod quietly at Gwen. It was impossible for Gwen to tell how old he had been, but he was substantially younger than most of the men living at Snug Harbor. If Gwen had to guess, he had barely seen his 40th birthday by the end of his life. The truth was, Gwen did not know how a man so young would have been a resident at Snug Harbor. The girl seemed in her mid twenties and a relationship between them wasn’t impossible. Gwen didn’t blame her, for despite his pocked face, he was a fine looking man, muscular and tanned from the long years at sea, without wrinkles and without that leathered appearance of the other Snugs. But his long blonde hair, tied severely back in a ponytail, was so heavily streaked with white that it seemed silver. He wore a dark vest with brass buttons that was open and a billowy, white, high collared shirt, worn open at the throat. A heavy gold ring, small but thick, pierced his ear and his hair had been tied with a piece of dark velvet ribbon. Dark suspenders, tan trousers and high boots gave Gwen the impression that he was a petulant Lord who had just gotten off his horse, rather than a sailor who had been working the seas. Except for the tattoos and his missing thumb. His sleeves had been rolled up to reveal a cornucopia of tattoos stretching from the backs of his hands upward, broken only by his shirtsleeves and collar, but continuing across his exposed collarbone and up the sides of his neck in snaking, twisting patterns. They reminded her of scrimshaw she had seen in the Smithsonian. She couldn’t focus on what the images were, there were so many, but here and there were definite scenes from the sea: raging ship battles, billowing sails, harpooned whales, swimming sharks, singing mermaids, stretching coastlines, twining pieces of rope, and undulating tentacles. His eyes gave her the same impression of silver, like his hair, so Gwen couldn’t tell whether they were blue or grey. Awkwardly, he held a small bowled, long stemmed, black pipe in his hand. It took Gwen a quick moment to determine why he held the pipe so strangely. His thumb had been crudely hacked off and was nothing more than a jagged stump. He pointed at the blackness beyond the edge of the room with the pipe and Gwen turned back to face it, the toes of her boots touching the peculiar little jut of wall that seemed more like a fence, small and incomplete, rather than a bona fide wall.
“Turn off the torch, miss and you’ll see it proper,” the silver haired man said softly as he stepped up behind her, sliding the pipe into a vest pocket. The bang of the door Scotty and Steve had finally managed to free overwhelmed the man’s quiet voice, but Gwen also heard him in her mind and felt his breath on her ear. Crystal had been picking splinters from her sleeve while Kenny and Lou investigated the pile of broken light-bulbs with a flashlight they had momentarily gleaned from Scotty. No one seemed to notice Gwen turning off her light to face the uncanny dark space at the end of the room. No one seemed to notice the slight blue-purple glow that emanated from the palms of her hands as they hung limply at her sides or the slight purple-gold glimmer that burst in the centers of her eyes as she stared into the dark.
They did notice when she opened her mouth to speak in a voice that was not her own.
“James Benedict Staunton is what it read on my birth certificate. Ben is what they called me. No one remembered my father’s parentage, out of Dublin. He died before I was born and my only escape from the mud and the famine was to sign onto His Majesty’s ship when I was barely a bearded lad.”
Simultaneously, Scotty asked if Gwen was ok and Lou accused her of fucking around. Steve had been in the other room, eager to show off the chalk drawings, but he came back when he heard the unfamiliar voice with its heavy Dublin accent.
Ben, the handsome sailor with the scarred face continued to speak through Gwen but he also had stepped inside her. He held up his hands which shimmered blue and green, superimposed over hers. She wasn’t sure if the others were able to see what she saw, but as Ben spoke through her, she felt and saw what he did.
He waggled the stump of his missing thumb. “Got my badge here on deck in the South China seas. ‘Twas a wrongful charge and I was humbugged to be sure. I be no prigger, no thief and never did I snaffle the Captain’s boots. Never did I toss ‘em overboard. I paid for a crime that tweren’t mine. His crime? Came to naught tho’. A rum bleating cheat he was. Cribbin’ our rum and the limes ‘twas like killin’ us it was. My only crime was takin’ it back from the merry-begotten picaroon. I smelt the rat when the lads growing sickly. The rum had been horribly baptized for the Captain’s own pr
ofit and no fresh limes had been stewed in the grog. The bubble was th’ bloody bastard locked up the lime crate and ordered the cook to keep the old limes, now pickled or rotten, in the grog. We got double the grog tub of what amounted to brown water, withal. We were gamoned make no mistake. The captain and his men, the cook and the bosun’s mate, all were shuffling fellows. They done us good.”
Kenny approached Gwen in a manner that had she been cognizant, she would have appreciated as all too reminiscent of the Ray Stantz and the librarian. Scotty would have laughed if his fiancé wasn’t glowing a lurid shade of blue like a preternatural Smurf. Steve barked at Lou, who had been frozen in place, clutching Crystal’s arm, to get the damned recorder going. While the trio had been tending to Crystal’s snagged and besplintered sleeve, they had turned off and pocketed their sound and video recorders. “You want proof, I think this is it boys! Live action!” Steve would have skipped for joy, until he noticed the dark swirling mass filtering into the room.
“Ten men were abed, bleeding from the gums with fevers and sores,” Ben continued. “Billy the rum dubber went back to his days pickin’ locks. He fetched his bess and his gilt from his locker and he and me found where the limes had been stowed, beneath the Captain’s own bunk. The holy lamb bastard. It was pure spite and mean-heartedness, the hog grubber that th’ Captain was. By the by we liberated the rum from the barrels that were supposed to be the slush put up for sale a-shore. Be that what it would, the bloody captain and the cook planned on humbugging us all, adding our rum and our limes to their slush fund.” Ben paused, shaking his head, and momentarily covering his eyes with his other hand. “Giving Sean and Patrick the rum steeped limes to suck wasn’t enough to keep the scurvy at bay and soon they went the way of the Captain’s boots, over the side into the dark. Losing this though,” he flexed the tattooed hand with the missing thumb, “that was the pinch of the game. Mutiny was necessitated. After spread eagling ‘im to the floggin’ stake, we gave the Captain what he deserved. The bosun was kept at the stake long after the Captain went over the side, not like Sean and Patrick, silent and still. No.” Ben’s voice rattled with a laugh that was not easy to listen to. “The Captain kicked and screamed and went over when we saw the sharks swimming round. But we gave him round dealings, better than he ever gave us with his lashes and his cobbings and his burning brands. The bosun, that hoggish buffer, we kept him for a good rig and spree. He danced at the gratings make no mistake. When Billy had the lash, there wasn’t room to swing a cat, but we soon silenced the squeaker and he went the way of his master, down to the sharks. The cook wasn’t flogged but chained in th’ galley ‘til a new cook was brought aboard. Then that holy lamb danced the Paddington frisk from the yardarm.”
Everyone else stood rooted to the spot as Gwen’s mouth told Ben’s story. Stefan and the others stood mutely by, watching and in just as much wonderment and confusion as the live folk. The only one to move at all was Kenny, who took up Steve’s advice to use the camera after placing the voice recorder on the floor just beside where Gwen was standing. Kenny kept the camera fixed on her, but occasionally tried to get an angle that got her in the frame with the shadows that seeped into the room and seemed to flow around them all like ink swirling in water. He saw them, but wasn’t sure if the camera would.
Ben flexed his hands and shook the other arm. For the first time Gwen noticed, from where she observed behind her eyes, a raw burn about the size of a goose-egg. “The white-hot flat of a blade removed the brand noting that we were all Her Majesty’s men. Oh it burned coming off. But, it wouldn’t do to have them letters there, screaming H-M-R-N,” he carefully enunciated each letter in his deep brogue, “when you get checked by the caterpillars and dragoons in every port. We weren’t no badgers, to be sure. We were upright men, a good crew, never were no ark ruffians and made a name for ourselves being honest rovers. We took on passengers eager to leave the Pacific heading back home, wherever home might be. Having live lumber aboard gave us more import. We weren’t like to be boarded. It took ages to fight the seas back round the Cape and on. No one would have trusted a privateer the way that gang trusted me and though we had no Captain proper—said we’d never again have that ilk on our decks—I was the scaly fish the boys looked to for guidance. After I got the fever though, all I wanted was rest. Still, I was trusted though, despite my floundering and my fevers, even after I came here,” he paused to wave his hands at the room around them, “in this reeking den of stolen moments away from the Guv’nor’s blasted eyes. Men living their lives a-sea, men used to their grog tub, their dice to wile away the doldrums, men like we could not be shunted into the lives of teetotalers and pulpit thumpers. So, we came here, with the stored luggage. And there,” Ben pointed into the black recess at the edge of the room, “is where I died, belly stuck like a whale’s back.” He laughed again. “So I’m guessing I weren’t as trusted as I thought to die like that, full of that many holes.”
As Ben spoke through her, Gwen felt her own tears burn her cheeks. The feeling of sorrow, seeing him held down by three men, stabbed and tossed into that black space like a discarded sack, made her sadder then words could express. Had Ben not been still inside her, she would have sunk to her knees, whispering words of forgiveness for his soul to whatever gods were listening. But, Ben turned on Gwen’s heel and strode into the next room. As she walked, Gwen felt a strange distortion, as thought she walked on stilts. Her head wasn’t high enough to hit the rafters, like Kenny was still doing as he trailed behind. But she was tall enough to feel the need to duck beneath them and was high enough that she could easily touch the carvings. Each beam of the next room, a tremendously long room that seemed to go on into blackness, were riddled with notches, crudely carved sayings—some Biblical, some perverse, letters, dates, crosses, and other designs. Ben walked her to one spot, in the farthest outer wall, nearly in the corner of the room. To their left was a brick wall separating the long room from a smaller room beyond and in front was the long, outer wall. He reached up to a carving, dated 1843 with the initials J.B.S beside a nail and what looked like a rude etching of a pineapple that had vaguely feminine attributes.
“I nodded in my hammock here and was woken by a rigging blade slashing my belly. They were newcomers here. Mean. Thought I had dropped a cog on them. As I said before, I never was a prigger and I never did thief their winnings. Accused me of being the Guv’nor’s man and did not like my dalliance with one of the matrons. Called was a quim and a dirty puzzle. I tweren’t a match for the swaddlers. They hushed me and said they’d hush her too in spite of me. Left me to rot in that hole in t’other room. I wasn’t found for nigh on three weeks, it bein’ winter and so cold up here. I was found though when the Guv’nor’s real men came a-lookin’ for a trunk. The garret door was nailed shut after the rum and dice were found too. I think the Guv’nor was all-fired on that account than on mine.”
As Ben ceased his tale, Gwen became aware that Lou was arguing with Kenny over the camera. Kenny had been recording, but apparently Lou felt it was just Gwen trying to get attention and pretending. Kenny saw the bluish glow to Gwen’s body, just as Scotty and Steve did, but neither Lou nor Crystal saw anything. Kenny was insisting that the camera might have picked up some distortion around Gwen’s arms. As Lou became more agitated, physically trying to pull the camera from Kenny’s hands, Gwen heard Ben’s thought: You don’t deserve to be in that body. It was a startling thought, followed by a series of what-ifs that reminded Gwen of someone looking to redecorate a kitchen: I’d stop shaving my head, lose some padding round the middle, and…. There were several thoughts about what Ben would do to Crystal had he been her husband, or had he been inside her husband’s body. Gwen felt a strange excitement that was not her own well up inside her; it was sexual but it was also an exhilarating a-ha moment. Ben knew what he wanted and it wasn’t the peaceful rest of oblivion.
He guided Gwen over to where Lou stood, his back to the sprawling chalk murals dotting the brick wall—eagles and anchors,
women and raging seas. Lou was triumphant in finally wrenching the camera from Kenny, or perhaps Kenny simply relinquished it being too tired to continue the childish quarrel. Momentarily, Gwen had become invisible again to both men, until she reached out, placing her palms firmly on each of Lou’s shoulders. As she touched him, blue fire enveloped her arms, spreading down, encircling Lou and then absorbing into him. The camera fell from his limp hands to the floor. He did not yell or scream or cry out, but he made a strange strangled noise, a gurgling whimper as Gwen felt Ben release from inside her to follow the path of the blue flames.
As Lou made the sound, Crystal tried to dash to where her husband stood, but finally her ankle gave way and she fell heavily to the floor with a snap. Crystal didn’t see the Gibson Girl separating herself from the throng of spirits. Gwen hadn’t seen it, but was certain the tall woman in grey had pushed Crystal down.
“What the fuck are ya doin’ to my Louie? Git away from him you-a bitch!” Crystal cradled her wounded ankle in both hands and began a whining, moaning diatribe that was very difficult to decipher. The only words that Gwen and the others could fathom were variations on “fuck,” “bitch,” “crazy” and “nutty fuckin’ place.” The tall woman stooped over Crystal, placing both gloved hands on Crystal’s face and breathlessly said, “Hush.” Crystal fell silent, clinging to her ankle
Kenny backed away from Gwen and Lou to cluster beside Scotty and Steve. The three men stood in a state of frozen astonishment. Not only was the whole blue flame thing, but the undulating mass of shadows had followed them all into the room and expanded. Initially, none of them saw the Gibson Girl over Crystal, but they saw a grayish smoke swallow up Crystal’s form to the point that they could barely see her. They watched the mass of shadows seeping into the room.
As it untangled, the men began to perceive spirits stepping out of the shadows. Some were distinct: a girl with golden hair and a small straw hat standing over Crystal, a man with a top hat and grey beard, another man but with one arm, and a stocky woman with a grey dress, grey hair and white apron. Others were impressions of people, but not solid. They saw a boy with a bowler hat, but through him they saw what looked like a woman in a nurse’s uniform and through her just a strange black shape. The spirits kept untangling from the mass until the entire room seemed filled to capacity. The men backed against the front wall, immediately beneath where Ben’s hammock had been so many years before. After seeing how readily Gwen allowed Ben’s spirit to channel through her and into Lou, they realized other spirits may have the same designs on them. They felt like hunks of raw meat in a shark tank.
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