Teel James Glenn
“Ghost ships, you say?” I asked my companion in the passenger section of the steam-powered paddle wheel ferry. I had an odd sensation at that moment, as if I had said it before, but shook it off and raised my voice because the rough seas outside roared with a banshee wail of wind. We were steaming toward Old Grimsby settlement on the Isle of Tresco in the Scilly Islands, some twenty-four nautical miles off the Cornish coast.
“Aye, ser,” said the bearded old salt who had confided his experience to me. “Last month it was, ships disappearing. Two I knows of fer sure. A packet and a ferry.” I could scarce make out what he said, between the clay pipe clenched precariously in his mouth and the wheezing and hissing of the steam-powered limb that had replaced his right leg. “And worse—reappearing in a strange fog but not quite—phantom ships seem to sail along the shoreline with the screams of those on shipboard.”
Most would take his story as a tall sea tale, but I had come to appreciate such things as more omens than imaginings. It might be the year of Our Lord Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-Four, but superstitions of ages gone lived long. My name is Jack Stone, Captain of the Horseguard, and currently seconded to Dr. Augustus Argent. The Doctor is Minister Without Portfolio for the Crown, charged with investigating occult affairs. Phantom ships were exactly the sort of thing to interest him. And with the odd occurrences happening recently in other corners of the Empire, it behooved me to look into his tale.
“You’ve seen these things yourself?” I asked the codger.
“Aye, ser,” he said. “There were thirty souls on that ferry and nay a single one of them’s been heard from again.”
I found this revelation most disturbing. I knew, of course, of the history of wreckers along the Cornish coast, and the wild waters legitimately claimed their share of souls, so ships disappearing was not an unknown occurrence. Still…
“Has the Admiralty not investigated?” I asked.
The old fellow gave a snorting laugh.
“Them swabs could nay find their own stern without help,” he said. “They dismissed it all. said I was over my rum ration, and claimed it was bottle-born bilge.” He all but chewed through his pipe. Setting his jaw, he seemed to decide he’d talked his quota for the trip and took to staring out the porthole to the churning sea.
It was just as well. I was set for Old Grimsby on a somber mission, escorting the remains of an old regimental chum to his birthplace in Dolphin Town on the island, and it was best I kept my mind on it. We had served together in Afghanistan, and on his deathbed, he asked me to return him home.
We came in sight of the long-disused, 16th-century blockhouse at the southern end of the harbor. As we pulled into the quay, we beheld a crowd from Old Grimsby, locals awaiting the weekly ferry for supplies and news from the outside world. There was a dirigible station on the island, but with the weather’s uncertainties, they only flew for a few months of the year to monitor the seas to the west.
“Captain Stone?” A thin, grey-haired gentleman met me at the dock. “I am Vicar Whytte of Saint Nicholas parish.” He extended a bony hand to shake mine, his grip surprisingly firm.
“What gave me away, sir?”
“If not that you are the only unfamiliar face,” he said with a smile, “your military bearing, even in civilian attire, betrays you.”
“Did you bring a wagon for Tommy’s remains?” I asked.
“Aye,” he answered, indicating a steam cart with a mechanical driverbot at the end of the pier. We walked to the cart while several of the stevedores loaded the coffin. “Tommy, like all of them, came home eventually,” he said with a little sadness. “Though most wait too long like he did.”
We rode along a coastal path to the graveyard outside his tiny church, sitting in reverent silence while the clanking of the wheels and the hiss of escaping steam filled the space.
I cast my eyes out at the choppy seas. I was thinking about what the old mariner said, so when I saw the vague shape on the horizon, at first, I thought it a daydream.
A four-master seemed to be moving in and out of a fog several miles out to sea, but not in any way I had ever seen before, in that the craft wavered—now solid, now translucent, all with a strange iridescent glow surrounding it.
I blinked and shook my head. The ship was of an older type indeed; I doubt its like had seen service since the Armada sailed. This is wrong, I thought, but even as I thought it, the image of the ship was gone, and the horizon was bare.
I most certainly need to contact Dr. Argent.
My whole being felt uneasy for the rest of the trip and kept me much on edge.
The ceremony to send Tommy on his way was a somber, quiet thing, with only the vicar and two locals there to say their goodbyes. Afterward, one of the attendees, a bearded salt of a man, approached me, introducing himself as a childhood friend of Tommy’s who had stayed behind on the island as a fisherman.
“Jeremy Karn,” he said, holding out a hand to me, “and you’re Captain Stone.” His grip was firm, and his palm calloused from a life of hard work. “Tommy described you to a T in his letters.”
“Guilty as charged, sir.”
“Jeremy, please.” He walked with me back toward the cart the vicar had brought. “You’re heading back with the ferry when it leaves?”
“Yes,” I said. “But I heard that is not for some hours.”
“Aye,” Karn said. “It waits for the tide. I’d be glad to stand you a pint or two while you wait.”
“That sounds like just the thing.”
The vicar let us take the cart, telling us that the steamboat driver would return it to him when we were done.
The fisherman was an amiable companion, and on the way to the town pub in Old Grimsby, we traded stories about Tommy and our lives in general. I could not tell him of my missions with Dr. Argent, of course, but he was an easy, uncomplicated man to talk with.
By his third pint at the pub, Karn started telling me sea tales about the island, and I asked him if he had any encounters with phantom ships.
“Aye, true it be,” he said, “out of the fog it came, a full-rigged vessel, it was, but old design, and well… not so substantial. I know, I know, sounds like bunkum, but I seen it. All misty and waving it were.”
I felt the same chill I’d had seeing that phantom ship on the way to the funeral. It was the sort of feeling I often had when encountering the extra-normal under Dr. Argent’s tutelage.
“I don’t doubt your word,” I said. “Just where did you see this ship?”
“Out by Wolf Rock it was,” he said. “There’s a fishing ground not far off that lighthouse.”
“Have you seen this ship again?”
“Aye,” the fisherman said. “Two more times in the last month, always in the morning mist just as the sun tops the horizon.” He finished his pint and looked up at the clock over the mantle. “Best be heading to the ferry, Jack, if you don’t want to be marooned here a week.”
I made a decision then. “Will you take me to where you saw this phantom?”
“What?”
“I’ll charter your boat to take me there,” I said. I smiled at his look of incredulity, so added, “I work for a government department, and they’ll foot the bill at a fair rate. The Admiralty will want a report on that phantom.”
Karn looked at me, apparently trying to decide if I was mad or in my cups, but after a long moment nodded. “Well, since I can’t take you out till morning, we’ve got time for a few more pints.”
I laughed. “Well, that sounds good to this Edinburgh lad. And from now on, The Crown will be buying.”
***
I took a room upstairs from the pub and retired after a full meal and several more pints, ready to be up before dawn. There was a Marconi set at the harbormaster’s quarters, and I was able to use my credentials to send a coded transmission via relay to Dr. Argent in London.
I found myself with a premonition that this side trip was important. There had been a number of events across the Empire, disappearances, odd weather occurrences, and reports of strange lights in the sky. This could just be connected, so I had to be alert.
Then it was early to bed for me, as the local grog was good enough to put this Scotsman in need of sleep.
***
We were up and off during the false dawn, sailing Jeremy’s little sloop into the gathered mist and heading east toward Wolf Rock Lighthouse. My companion was a solo sailor, eschewing a navigational robot or star guider, and was grateful for the company and, to be truthful, for the Crown fee I promised him.
We had a good wind, and he’d brought a wineskin and a basket of food, so we had our breakfast as we sailed, both none the worse for our drinking the night before. I relaxed and enjoyed the open sea as the morning mist burnt off. All in all, we had a pleasant trip.
“It be in these waters I seen it both times,” Karn said a few hours into our trip. “We’ve just entered the fishing grounds. Wolf Rock is just over the horizon.”
The stone spire of the lighthouse just peeked above the rim of the sea, looking lone and forlorn in the vast, empty ocean. Yet there was some sense working on my mind that I felt oddly ill at ease.
I looked at the ocean differently now, studying it as if it were a predatory beast. It was then I noticed that while the surface lay calm, there was a change in the color. When I remarked on it to Karn, he just nodded.
“Aye,” he said. “Been that way for a few weeks, a strange color it be—happened around the time I first saw the—there!”
His exclamation drew my attention to a low bank of fog crawling across the distant surface of the sea and coming our way. More to the point, I beheld a shape in that fog, indistinct and wavering in the bilious, green mist.
“There it be!” Karn whispered, awed as I was by the sight. “Are we looking at the Flying Dutchman?”
It was a large ship, an old square-rigged three-master. Indeed, it looked to be a ghostly apparition of another age, for it was almost transparent, wavering in and out of substantiality like a desert heat mirage.
“God’s garters,” I gasped, “it’s coming straight for us!”
“But that’s impossible,” Karn said. “It’s moving directly against the wind.”
Impossible or not, it traveled at a good clip against the wind, straight at us—I saw distinct figures moving on its deck, scurrying up the sheets and generally performing the duties of swabbies of times past.
“It’s going to ram us!” Karn yelled as he swung the boom to tack, leaning hard into the tiller to move us out of the phantom’s path. His efforts were to no avail; all it did was move us so that the phantom bow raced at our midship, broadside.
I was about to leap overboard to escape when the square rig plowed into us—and went through! It was as insubstantial as a puff of smoke, but as the massive vessel passed through our boat, I felt a bone-chilling cold pass through me.
There was a strange electric charge, one that carried aetheric emanations such as I had felt before. I went lightheaded so that I fell against the sail boom. I saw that Karn also fell over, gripping the gunwales of the sloop.
In a few moments, the phantom moved beyond us, the luminous mist moving with it, and then, as I watched, it seemed to evaporate. Suddenly, we were alone on the surface of the ocean.
“Saint’s alive!” Karn gasped. I made my way to him, for he was still shaking, though whether from fear or the paranormal chill, I could not say. It was not my first encounter with things outside the norm, and while I was upset, he seemed more than unsteady.
“Easy, man,” I said. I took the tiller from him as he cowered on the deck.
“I swear I’ve never seen anything like that,” he managed. He was pale and wild eyed, not steady on his feet at all.
“Take it easy, Jeremy. Break out the ‘emergency’ rum I know you fellows always have and relax.”
He barely managed to crawl to a locker, pull out a bottle, and take a healthy swig, before muttering, “Make for the lighthouse. It’s an easy channel. I feel the need to be on solid ground.”
Having no desire to repeat our encounter with the phantom craft, I turned our boat toward the lighthouse, as instructed.
Wolf Rock thrust up directly out of the ocean in seeming defiance of the waves pounding around it, the lighthouse itself a marvel of human versus nature’s extremes. This third iteration of the structure rose forty-one meters above the ocean, a solid bastion built from Cornish granite brought from Penzance and erected over eight years for the challenges of the weather and location.
Its light was a lance of brilliance visible for over twenty nautical miles, cutting through the salt spray day and night. A keeper manned the light, keeping constant vigil on the bare rock of the island. I shared Karn’s sudden need to feel solid ground beneath my feet. And the fisherman looked to need real help, perhaps more than I could tender.
The pier lay just around the point and, as he had indicated, was easy to reach as the ocean bottom dropped away sharply from the rock—which contributed to the violence of the churning waters. I steered the boat up to the stone jetty and pier and managed to tie up alongside. Then I jumped back aboard to get Karn. He lay against the gunwale shivering, his eyes wild and manner distracted. He was a big fellow and dead weight, so it took all I had to hoist him over the side of the boat to the dock without falling.
The lighthouse and a cottage beside it were several hundred yards away, a farther distance than I could carry the fisherman.
“I’ll be back for you in a bit, Jeremy,” I said as I set him down against a stone outcropping at the foot of the jetty. “Hold on, mate, I won’t be long.”
He stared up at me with an odd expression, almost as if he could not see me—as if he were looking at some far-off vision. His lips moved, but no sound came out. He was in a bad way.
“Easy, mate,” I said, not knowing what else to do. He gestured beyond me out toward the ocean, and I looked, half expecting to see the phantom ship again, but there was nothing there. At least nothing I could see save a darkening sky that foretold a storm coming in.
I had no choice but to leave him and race toward the cottage near the lighthouse to try and get help.
The building was rustic, a single story with a tiled roof and shuttered windows. When I reached it, I found the door locked. I pounded on it.
“Hallo,” I shouted, “I need help.”
After several fruitless moments with no response, I left the cottage and headed for the lighthouse itself.
At the base of the massive tower, I was about to reach the door when the portal swung open, and a man stepped out.
“Who’s this?” he asked. “What are you about?” The man was thin with a high forehead and narrow, birdlike features. He was dressed in an old-style frock coat in a vivid hue of red with a black knit watch cap barely stretched across his balding pate. He waved an augmented left arm at me, the gears grinding, the hiss of the steam-powered limb somehow sinister.
“My apologies, squire,” I said, “But there is a sick man on your dock, and we seek aid.”
He looked at me with a neutral expression, his eyes regarding me as if he doubted I was really there. He blinked like an owl, pulled out an oversized pocket watch, looked at it, and then up at me again. “Aid?” he asked.
“Yes, he’s not in a good way,” I said.
He regarded me like a bug under a microscope for a moment, then nodded.
“Let’s see this fellow, eh what?” The red-coated man brushed past me and walked back toward the jetty with a peculiar bent-kneed gait that made me think of a sailor who hadn’t regained his land legs.
The two of us made it to the dock in no time, but Karn was nowhere to be seen.
“I left him right here,” I said. Then I called out, “Jeremy? Where are you, fellow?”
I looked all around, even leaping back on the boat, but of my friend, there was no sign. When I looked out toward the sea, the storm clouds roiled thicker now, a grey mass moving toward us in a solid line, but there was something else, a strange verdant glow coming off the ocean at the horizon.
“I’ve seen Saint Elmo’s fire,” I said as I stared at the odd glow, “but nothing like this.”
“You really had a fella here?” the lighthouse keeper asked.
“I realize I have been rude. I’m Jack Stone,” I said, “my friend is Jeremy Karn—that is his boat.”
“Well, where is he?” The red-coated man’s voice was shrill, and his tone annoyed.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He couldn’t move when I left him.”
Indeed, I was at a loss to think what could have happened to Karn, for the fisherman had been barely conscious when I set him down.
The storm now approached with force, the raindrops almost horizontal and the wind whipping the waves to white-capped hills.
“We’d better get inside,” the lighthouse keeper said, raising his voice to be heard above the howl. “It’s gonna be a hard blow.”
He spoke the truth, for the wind raged strong enough that I had to fight to stay upright. At the same time, the wind was making the rock live up to its name, howling like a pack of wild wolves.
“We can’t leave Jeremy out here,” I yelled.
“But he ain’t out here,” he called with a wave of his augmented arm. “You can stay if you want, but I don’t have time to waste freezing for a figment of your imagination.” With that, he turned and headed back toward the cottage.
I stood for a moment, unable to bear the idea of leaving Karn to whatever fate had befallen him, but the violence of the wind forced me to reconsider. The sky was as dark as night, and visibility was rapidly dropping. I realized I would have no chance of finding the fisherman in the gale as it was. I fought the wind all the way to the cottage, falling twice, but reached the door not far behind the keeper.
Once inside, the fellow closed and barred the door behind us. The cottage was rustic with a roaring fire going in the hearth, but few other conveniences save that there were a dozen clocks of different types all around the room.
My host doffed his frock coat, and I could see the full extent of the mechanical arm; it replaced his entire limb. He adjusted the gears, then went to the hearth to warm himself, pausing to also adjust one of the clocks.
Being soaked to the skin as well, I removed my jacket and joined him.
“Dyowl,” he said when I crouched down by the fire.
“Say again, sir?”
“Dyowl Hobbson,” he said. “That’s my name.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mister Hobbson.” I warmed my hands for a moment, then rose. “I’m sorry to impose further, but do you have a mackinaw I can borrow? I really must head back out to look for Jeremy.”
Outside, the wind still howled but seemed, from the sound, to be letting up.
“Ye can’t go far in that,” Hobbson said. “Nothing to do till it passes. In time, all things do. So far, anyway.”
“But Jeremy can’t—”
“You’ll not find him out there, fella,” the keeper said. “But you’re welcome to my mack over there. I gotta get back to the lighthouse. I just came out for this—” He held up a silver and brass device with clockwork gears the size of a hen but brightly colored.
The keeper went to the back door of the building, donned a cloak, and then, with not even a backward glance, went out.
I put on the offered rain gear, including a hat, and went out the front door into the maelstrom in search of my friend.
The nature of the storm had indeed changed in the few minutes I had been in the cottage. It still rained, but the wind had died to almost nothing, making me recall what I knew of hurricanes, massive storms with a calm center.
Could this be such a storm? The sky had lightened but still had that odd green glow behind the clouds.
“Jeremy!” I yelled. I raced toward the jetty to where I’d left the fisherman, initially thinking to start a search with that at the center of a pattern.
Imagine my shock when I reached the foot of the jetty, and Karn sat exactly where I’d left him! He was unmoving, propped up against the low stone wall of the jetty, but otherwise, exactly as I had last seen him.
I started to run toward the man, calling his name, but before I was twenty yards away, he began to glow a strange green and waver like a mirage, his form blurring at the edges. Then, to my shock, he simply blinked out of existence and was gone.
I skidded to a halt. “Jeremy?” I yelled. When I reached the spot where he had been, I felt that same odd tingling as when the phantom ship had passed through our boat, becoming disoriented, spots appearing before my eyes, and it was a few moments before I could stabilize myself. When I did, there was no sign of my friend. I looked around, frantic to find him or some other trace, but there was nothing.
I looked back toward the lighthouse, shocked again to see that the tower was bathed in the same eerie glow that had shrouded the phantom ship and Karn.
The beacon atop the tower alternated a white lance of light and a red, but the overall glow of the building was as if it was backlit by the fires of hell.
The whipping rain gained force again, the storm’s fury growing once more. I knew now that I indeed dealt with something of Dr. Argent’s realm, like the strange weather events across the empire, this was something beyond the normal.
I fought the wind and raced to the lighthouse. If I was to find Jeremy, I had to know what was actually going on.
I reached the building just as the fury of the storm exploded again. A slash of blinding white light cast my shadow on the lighthouse tower ahead of me, so I had the sensation of fleeing into my own umbra.
Finding the door unlocked, I yanked it open and raced in, grateful to be out of the wind, but I stopped short, shocked by what I saw inside.
A spiral staircase wound around the wall of the tower. The central space, left open almost all the way up, over forty meters, held the strangest mechanism I had ever seen, filling the space.
In the center hung a long, bronze pendulum enveloped in an odd green shine. All around it ran a dazzling array of gears and clear tubes through which multicolored liquids flowed and bubbled. It cast bizarre luminous patterns across the walls of the vertical space creating a dizzying, hallucinogenic display.
More than just the light show, a strange humming emitted from the odd mechanism, a deep, vibrating sound that seemed to press against my diaphragm in a way that taxed my breathing.
I yelled, “Hobbson!” but the mechanism before me dwarfed my booming voice. “What is going on?”
I did not wait for an answer. Racing to the spiral steps, I sprinted up, careful not to look down, for while there was a handrail, the gaping maw of the central shaft was a frightening thing, made more so by the lightshow and the hypnotic hum of the infernal device.
I reached the apex of the stairs and was confronted with an ornately carved wooden door that looked completely out of place in that tower. It looked more like something one would expect to see on some Middle Eastern tomb.
“Hobbson!” I yelled. I tried the knob and found it to be locked. “Hobbson!” I repeated and pounded on the door with both fists. “Let me in!”
For long moments, only the humming of the strange device throbbed against my eardrums. Then came the sound of a bolt being thrown, and the door flew inward.
“I cannot be annoyed now,” the lighthouse keeper sneered at me. His eyes were wide, his expression angry. “I am close now, finally, close.”
“What madness is this?”
“Madness?” he shrieked. He gave a sweeping gesture at the space behind him. The beacon was there but with strange prismatic mirrors angled to reflect the rays from the mechanism below into the tower’s light. That newly refocused beacon now flashed out as a strange, greenish glow.
Beyond, I could see the horizon of the sea, and what I beheld took my breath away. There were ships there, at least three, but from distinctly different time periods: sail and steam powered, a ferry, a man’o’war, and the square rig I had seen before. I saw the ferry, much like the one I’d taken to Old Grimsby, solid and real, begin to waver out of solidity to become like the other phantom shapes, etched in green.
“What devilish thing is this?” I accused.
He laughed like a damned soul. “Not devilish,” he proclaimed, “godlike! I have cracked the code and found the secret. Time is now my toy.”
The enormity of what he said struck me like a physical blow. From the wide windows, I could see all of Wolf Rock set out below us, and on the jetty, I could see Jeremy Karn again, glowing green and wavering in and out of existence.
“Stop this,” I said. “You have no idea what terror you are unleashing. The Aether is a power beyond control. You can’t possibly foresee the repercussions.”
“I can control it, only I!” he cackled. “I can gather the threads of the cosmos and reweave them to my liking. I will prove to the world my greatness! Damn them all.”
“No,” I said. “Those forces are beyond anyone to control, you fool. Others have tried and paid the ultimate price. You have upset the very balance of reality, not only here but across the Empire.” Before he could argue further, I moved to lunge toward him, but abruptly, he had a revolver in his hand.
“I cannot be stopped—not now, I am so close.” He tried to raise the gun to aim at me, but I moved with the speed of desperation, throwing myself at him. I got my hand on the cylinder so he could not fire.
“I must complete my work,” Hobbson screamed. Though thin, he had the strength of madness, and it took all my power to keep the barrel pointed away from me.
“You have to stop this,” I yelled, “you are destroying lives.”
He made inarticulate snarling sounds, his teeth grinding, his eyes bulging.
Outside, the ships moved on the waves, all more solid now, as if each time period were giving up their prisoner ships to this, our own time. Karn, below, was fully here and now again. He rose on shaky legs to stare around him in confusion.
“This… must… stop!” I screamed with my own mad strength. With a final surge of desperation, I threw Hobbson back the way I had come, through the open doorway and out, over the stair railing and into the infernal device.
The mad keeper screamed a long, undulating cry of pain that ended abruptly when he smashed into one of the clear, liquid-filled tubes, bursting it to drench him. His flesh sizzled where the liquid touched him even as he continued to fall, bouncing off the various mechanisms like a game ball, ricocheting back and forth until he thudded onto the tower’s stone floor.
The kaleidoscope of lights now flared into a blinding, green fire, and I staggered back into the prisms in the light room. As I fell into them the crystals shattered, and I swirled into a rainbow of madness, reaching out, grasping for any anchor.
Finding only blackness…
I fell into a seemingly infinite, swirling maelstrom of light, and from that whirling reality, I could see across a limitless space. I saw the ships again, but somehow could also see the individuals on them, all screaming in agony. I also saw dozens of other ships on other seas than the Atlantic. All were wavering in and out of tangible reality.
I felt a force then, clawing at the edges of my mind, a remorseless, impersonal force, bending reality into shapes I could not comprehend. And somehow, I knew it was a force in direct opposition to the thing we called life.
I screamed a soundless cry of terror then, lashing out against this force, and my hand made contact with some of the crystal prisms. My knuckles smashed into them and then everything exploded into a thunderburst of color.
“Ghost ships, you say?” I found myself asking the old sailor in front of me. I sat in the passenger section of the paddle wheel steam ferry where it had all begun. I stopped speaking and looked around me in confusion.
“Aye, ser,” the old sailor said. Then he looked at my odd expression. “Be ye alright, lad?”
I found myself breathing hard, looking around with a vague feeling of dread. Then I looked down into my hand and saw that I had a faceted prism of crystal in my hand.
“Time,” I said aloud with the beginning of understanding. “Yes, time. Fluid.”
“You need to sit down, fella,” the one-legged sailor said. “You need get yer bearings.”
“Yes,” I said, “bearings. I’ll get my bearings sure enough.”
I knew then that I would put Tommy to rest as I had before and meet Jeremy Karn and Hobbson. But now, now, perhaps not the way I had. But could I change what had happened? Did I have any chance against such eldritch forces?
Only time would tell.