Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills

“Poor old Lillah Allers!” I continued my musing, thinking of the ship, not the lady. The last time Captain Allers took her out of the Golden Gate he knew he would come to grief, for the night before he had seen the ghost of his late wife, a Gladstone bag and a hatbox in her hands, walking hurriedly down the gangplank.

“The ship is doomed!” he told the mate as soon as they were out of the bay, but before they had dropped the pilot. “My wife’s spirit has deserted us!”

The mate respectfully suggested that the captain might have mentioned this before they threw off their dock lines. He added that he would just step into his cabin for his gear and go ashore with the pilot; but the captain wouldn’t hear of it.

Well, they dropped the pilot, hoisted the old Lillah Aliers’s kites, and sailed over the horizon, never to be seen or heard of again!

I walked to the weather rail and watched the clouds of phosphorescence rise and subside. A school of bonito was over our windward quarter, streaking the sea with parallel lines of fire. I could hear from above our masts the squawking of a tropic bird, and from the galley Seaside’s whine as he cried: “Jump me, Perks! You’ve got to jump!” or cackling with glee as he told the ghost that he had made the king row. The poor deluded native was imagining he was playing draughts with the spirit of Able-bodied Seaman Alexander Perks!

I returned to my musings, letting my mind wander to stories of other haunted ships. There was the Ghost Ship of Richard Middleton that was blown into Host’s turnip patch by the great gale; the Flying Dutchman; the Marie Celeste, the Maori canoe of ill omen that appears at night in the lagoon of an island before a great catastrophe is to occur. Then there was Captain Arthur Mason’s Wampa with its mysterious Hindu stowaway, who saved the ship during a hurricane by taking orders from the ghost of the dead captain and transmitting them to the crew. Haunted ships are as common as haunted houses, for sailors are as superstitious as old women; their lives are governed by omens and presentiments. Even I, who have a theory that such things are all nonsense, find myself half believing in them at times. There is Perks, for instance. Much though I deride his existence, it is sometimes difficult to disbelieve in him; in fact, it requires all the cogency of my theory to prove him an illusion.

III

“I beat him,” said Seaside as he climbed over the break of the midship house.

“Suppose you turn in instead of snooping around deck and playing checkers with imaginary specters,” I replied sharply. “You’ll be good for nothing to-morrow unless you get some sleep.”

“Old men seldom sleep,” the second mate told me; “and to-night I could never lie in my bunk, I’d be that fidgety.”

“What’s all the trouble?”

The old man came close to me and whispered: “We make Vostok Island to-morrow, Captain Andy says, and I’m to go ashore for birds’ eggs!”

“All the more reason for you to sleep to-night.”

“But Perks?”

“What about him?”

Seaside leaned against the weather rail and let his sharp little eyes wander aloft. He shook his head knowingly, and again the fatuous grin played across his mouth; but in another moment he was whispering his story to me — whispering it because, as he said, he did not want Perks to overhear.

Three years ago, according to Seaside, the Pirara was not a haunted ship; but one day Captain Andy decided to put into Vostok Island for sea birds’ eggs, and then all the trouble started. They came along the reef in the afternoon, and Seaside was landed with some empty boxes for the eggs. The reef boat put back to the schooner, leaving him alone. The old man waded through the shallows and climbed up the beach with his boxes, untroubled by an inkling of the harrowing experience which lay ahead.

It was a dreary place, he told me, of coral formation and without more than six feet elevation on its highest point. Not a coconut tree grew there, nor a bush, nor a blade of grass; but inland the island was overgrown with great puka trees, whose huge soft and porous trunks towered straight and slimy two hundred feet in the air, and there broke into a mass of foliage so dense that only a dismal leaden light seeped through, lugubrious, as is the fading refulgence of twilight. The ground swarmed with black Norwegian rats and coconut crabs, the latter a foot long, their bodies scarlet-red, their eyes protruding, their claws powerful enough to snap off a man’s finger. Millions of birds roosted like owls on the limbs of the trees, squawking with a deafening clamor, leaving their perches by the thousand as the old native passed beneath them. Other than these there was no sign of life on that unearthly island.