Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills

“There’s another one over, thank the good Lord!” she muttered. “My, what a number of rollers there are in the ocean! It is perfectly ridiculous! I’ve crossed as many as seven thousand in a single day. That was on the good old Shanghai-Frisco run when beating against the north-westerlies. Ah, those were the days! No filthy copra then, but cases of silks and tea, and clean mats of rice with little tins of opium hidden in them. And in those days Captain Pester gave my spars a coat of varnish every four months, all my standing rigging was served, and the brass on my rail shone beautifully. There were no broken catheads or rusty jib-boom guys on me then.”

One bell sounded. I heard it in my sleep, but refused to waken for another moment or two.

“Get up, get up!” the old schooner cried maliciously. She concluded, her voice dwindling away to a murmur that finally merged into the plash of water along her sides: “Get up and go on deck, Lazybones, and finish your sleep while you’re on watch.”

There was a scratching on my cabin port light; then the senile whine of old Seaside, the Kanaka second mate: “One bell! One bell! Ropati tané!”

I opened my eyes. The scratching continued, irritating me. Knowing it would not stop until I replied, I pounded on the bulkhead, and growled, “All right, Seaside, you old fool! I hear you!”

The scratching stopped. I jumped out of my berth, lit the lamp, and dressed. Then, turning the lamp low, I climbed on deck just as the Seth Thomas clock struck eight times and the second mate repeated the hour on the ship’s bell. He was alone, with the wheel lashed, for we had given the sailors the entire night below so we could work them all day on the morrow holystoning, scraping, and oiling decks.

The old man grinned at me, exposing his three yellow wolf-fang teeth. He sat on the wheel box with the binnacle light full on his deeply wrinkled face, making his sharp little eyes glow evilly. I glanced at the compass and then went to the weather rail to feel the wind. We seemed to be keeping on our course, full and by on the port tack. Returning to Seaside, I asked —

“Well, old man, how’s your friend the ghost to-night?”

I was referring to Mr. Alexander Perks, A.B., the spirit that is supposed to haunt this trading schooner. Mind you, I don’t believe a word of it; but the sailors claim they see the old gentleman snooping around every night, trying to get one of them to play draughts with him. Personally, I say it’s all nonsense, for I have a theory that there are no such things as ghosts.

“Up and about,” came from Seaside’s grinning lips. “Listen, there he is now!”

“It’s only the wind, Seaside, you old fool,” I replied. “Only the wind moaning in the shrouds.”

“It’s Perks,” the old man declared, his smile fading and an indignant flash appearing in his eyes. Abruptly he turned and pointed to the galley. “And there he is; I must go and have a yarn with him. I’ll be back by and by.”

I glanced forward. There was a nebulous glimmer visible through the galley door, and I could understand how a simple native like Seaside might imagine it a ghost. Of course I knew better.

“It’s only the moonlight, Seaside,” I said as the old man started forward. “Only the moonlight shining through the galley window.”

The silly old fellow laughed in his cackling way as he crossed the midship house deck. “It’s gone now, but still the moon shines,” he said. A moment later he had dropped into the waist and entered the galley, leaving me to my thoughts.

II

Rats and ghosts, I mused, are favorable omens to a sailor, for they always desert a ship that is doomed. There was the old Lillah Alters, for instance, which was named after her owner’s wife — the owner was his own skipper. If I remember rightly, Mrs. Allers died aboard during a blow off the Horn. Lillah must have been a terror to the captain, for she used to come on deck when the wind freshened and make suggestions about taking in the royals, reefing the t’gallant-s’ls, or tying up the flying jib.

“Woman,” Captain Allers would say to her in his sternest tone, “thy place is below; get thee below to thy sewing!”

This would make the old lady rave, for she believed that in a tight place she was more levelheaded than the captain; also, she claimed to have presentiments which never failed her. Well, she died that night off the Horn while she was in the midst of one of her presentiments. She had rushed on deck to declare that something terrible was about to happen. Just then the spanker backed, carried away its boom tackle, and, jibbing over, caught her on the nape of the neck. She was buried in Latitude 60°18′ South; but her spirit stayed by the ship, and Captain Allers used to swear that every time the wind freshened to a gale he could see her hovering above the poop deck, gesticulating frantically, pointing aloft in an effort to give some advice about handling the ship.