The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

At about 2 A.M. there began a curious phenomenon. There were four of us on the bridge – Jimmy, the signalman Douglas, a lookout nicknamed Hopeless, and myself. We were all drenched to the skin and exhausted by the violence of our beating from the wind. We huddled together, clutching at the sides of the bridge. It was impossible to speak, for even if we bawled the wind, now tearing past us at a hundred miles an hour, laden with stinging salt water, wrenched the sound away from our lips and drowned it in a howl. But Hopeless managed, after a couple of attempts, to make some words heard. “CAN YOU SEE? IS – IT – SPIRITS?” He was obviously upset about something. He couldn’t let go to point, but it wasn’t necessary, for we saw for ourselves. Creeping along the gunwale, starting from the bows, were ripples of bright blue light. In a minute they reached the bridge and crept under our fingers. Then the stump of the mast was ringed with blue – then every wire, every rope, all the edges of everything, including the hoods of our duffel coats, our finger-nails, the tops of our sea-boots. The light varied in thickness from the tenth of an inch to the breadth of a thumb, but all was of equal brilliance, a vivid blue, and seemed to move to and fro as if alive. For two hours we battled on, bristling with blue light, fascinated, entranced by its prettiness, and each of us hardly daring to wonder how the night would end. Before dawn the light receded.

The dawn came very late that morning. Jimmy managed to say “Happy New Year!” in my ear. The dawn was more terrible than the night, for the waves were thirty feet and over, and we could see each one completely and calculate its danger. They were a dirty yellow in colour, where they weren’t white, as if they were scooping up the seabed. Some of them assumed fantastic toppling shapes, tapering up to narrow ribands of water through which we could see the wave behind; then the tops would be blown clean off, like eggs cut with a knife, and a solid mass of water would disappear in streaks in the air. Part of the port gunwale was smashed and washed away. At ten to eight we sighted a rocky island, tow hundred yards ahead. We saw it for the second we were balanced on top of a wave. We didn’t get another opportunity, for it was hidden by walls of water. That island rises to twenty feet above sea level. It is about a quarter of a mile in circumference and uninhabited. From our perch on the top of the wave we saw the whole island was awash and at the northern end submerged. From that glimpse I was able to ascertain our position. We had been blown twenty-six miles north of our rough course during the night. I turned the ship head on into the sea. On a calm day the Peter could knock up fourteen knots. Her speed of advance into this sea, flat out, was half a knot.

Throughout the day we maintained the same speed – half a knot. The four of us clung together, in the same position we had been in all the time. I bawled down the voice-pipe to the coxswain, asking him if he was all right. “Fine!” came the reply, and I think I heard whistling. We all longed for something to drink, but it was out of the question. Every man in the ship was pinned to his position. How the lads in the engine-room, in that sickly smell of hot oil, stood it out I shall never know.

I cannot remember when we began to pray. When we realised, I think, that at this speed we had no hope of shelter that night, and a very good chance three or four times a minute of capsizing or being pounded to pieces. When we saw the rocky island awash, I was aware that Douglas, crouched against me, had released his hand for a moment to cross himself. That, I think, set us all – anyway, those of us on the bridge – saying the Our Father. We mingled our muttered prayers with attempts at rather bawdy music-hall songs, not in defiance of God, but to relieve our minds of the strain. By the afternoon our faces were sodden with water, puffy and raw. Our eyes were ghastly to look at and painful to keep open. One at a time we probably dropped asleep, to awake thirty seconds later wondering how many hours had gone by. So we stayed there, having no alternative. At six o’clock I tried to sing “For those in peril on the sea” – and then it occurred to me to exorcise the ship. How silly and inexplicable that sounds! I am almost ashamed to write it. I wriggled round to face the after part of the ship, which included the cabin where I had experienced that evil thing. Jimmy and Douglas clasped me round the chest while I raised my right hand, making the sign of the cross. “In the name of Jesus Christ, leave us!” I said. Poor Hopeless! That depressed him more than anything. He began to cry.