The Castaways (5 page)

“Well, we can’t,” he said simply.

“Why not?”

“Because you can’t steer a phantom, Tom. She’s the
Flying Dutchman;
I told you that.” We were sitting on the deck, leaning against the cookhouse wall. “Wind and weather means nothing to her. She goes where she likes.”

He tipped back his head, as though he could see the masts and canvas. There was a breeze that carried the smoke from Gaskin’s fire in swirls through the rigging. But the ship still wallowed along, rocking in the waves. The bell would have been tolling merrily if Gaskin hadn’t lost his patience and torn away the clapper.

“You hear how the sails flap and slither?” asked Midgely “There’s wind to fill them, ain’t there? She could put her railing down if she wanted. But she’s plodding along instead, ’cause that’s what she wants.”

When it came to sails and ships, Midge could see more in his blindness than I with my sight. But to me the sails looked all higgledy-piggledy, and I wondered if Midge wasn’t imagining what he
wanted
to see, or what he thought he
ought
to see if the ship was really his phantom.

“She found
us
, didn’t she?” he said. “She came and picked us up, and now she’s off for someone else. When the time’s right, she’ll hoist her skirts and run. That’s the Dutchman’s curse; he has to spend the rest of time dashing here and there, plucking souls from the sea.”

“I don’t know about the Dutchman,” I said. “But the ship
is only a ship, and if we trim the sails we can go where we want.”

“Don’t even try,” said he.

“But—”

“Don’t even try.”

That was the end of it, as far as Midge was concerned. Without him, I couldn’t hope to get the ship turned around. So I got up and went into the cookhouse.

Benjamin Penny, and Weedle in his pirate clothes, were down on the floor playing a gambling game with dried beans. Boggis was bent over the stove, his chest heaving as he blew mightily into the fire. He liked fire, Boggis did. With the stove open, the flames leaping inside, he looked like a sort of fire god.

At his side was a book. He was holding a taper that he’d rolled from its pages, and smoke was wafting from its end, as though he held a magical wand.

From curiosity—nothing more—I picked up the book. It was handwritten, carelessly blotted, so that many of the words were lost in splashes and puddles of ink. More pages were missing than were left, but from the first passage I read, I could tell I was holding a strange story of the sea.

“We sail in search of Gold,” it began. I had to chase flies from the page to see the letters. “But I fear all of Us will die before this Journey’s done. Our Ship already is a tomb, though the Dead still hammer on the Coffin.”

The next few words were drowned in ink, impossible to read. But I soon discovered that the ill-fated ship at the center of the tale was bound for the West Indies. It had last touched land at Java, where two sailors had joined the crew.

“A Fever came aboard with the new Hands,” wrote the narrator. He had no respect for capital letters. “It was not Breakbone or Malaria nor any Illness of the Jungle. It was that Incurable Fever which comes from Gold! Within the hour the news had spread throughout the Ship, so that all knew of it from the boy to the Captain, and all shouted of it together. ‘There has been a strike in Georgia! In the Wilderness of the New World! Nuggets of the Precious Metal lie on the ground like cinders on a path!’ Ah, the "Yellow Fever of the Gold. How it poisons the mind! At the mere sound of the Word there is no thought of anything but Gold—gold in nuggets, gold in veins, gold in fine dust. I was not immune from this myself. But none succumbed to the Fever as quickly and wholly as our Captain and the Mate.”

The rest of the page was torn away, and the next few missing altogether. When the tale continued, the captain and half the crew had apparently perished. There were fewer than six left on the ship.

I was wondering about the story, and what might have happened, when I saw the smoking taper in Gaskin’s hand.

Up I leapt and snatched it away. I waved it madly to extinguish the smoldering end, but it only burst into flame. I hurled it to the deck and stomped it to ashes.

Weedle and Penny and Gaskin were staring at me as though I’d lost my senses. They said not a word as I picked up the charred remains and unrolled the paper.

There was a list of names. It was headed “All Hands,” and in a very different writing it named the members of the crew. At the top was “John Roberts, bosun’s mate,” at the bottom, “Henry Nore, the boy,” with three of the names crossed over,
and two others penciled in at the bottom. There were many strange marks and notations that I couldn’t make out.

I asked Boggis, “Where did you get this?”

He pointed at the book.

“And where did you get
that?”
I said.

“I found it in the wood bin, Tom.” He scratched his bottom. “I needed something for fire-starting.”

There was no use being angry. I smoothed the burnt page and set it in among the others. I turned to the back of the book to see how the story ended.

“I feel my days are numbered. I can hold out no longer, and now only await my end. If I am lost, and this Account survives, let it be known that our Murdering Captain and the Mate were the undoing of every man, and the Ruin of our Voyage. May Justice be done! God rest us all!”

I knew the tricks of writers. They were crafty fellows who took bits of fancy and dressed them up to look like fact. But there was something about the ink-spotted journal, and the way it was written, that gave me no doubt it was a true account of the last days of the very ship we were on. I supposed that the writer had been the cook, and that his journal would have vanished forever if Boggis hadn’t stumbled across it.

I carried the book outside and began, right then, to read it to Midgely I told him only that it was a story of the sea, but he guessed very quickly that there was more to it than that. For a while he listened as I read.

Midgely stopped me there. “Is this true or made up?” he asked.

I told him I didn’t know. We were sitting with our shoulders touching, and he reached out and put his fingers on the paper, as though he could feel the ink and the scratchings of the writer’s pen.

There was a gap in the story where pages were missing. Then a boat was being launched, and men were being thrown into it as they struggled and screamed.

Midgely closed the book. With a flick of his hand he slammed it shut on my fingers. “It’s made up,” he said. “It ain’t true.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“It’s someone telling tales, that’s what it is,” said Midge. “It’s true about the captain, and it’s maybe true about the gold. But the castaways, that’s rubbish. The Dutchman
picks up
the sailors, Tom; he don’t cast them away.”

“Well, then maybe we’re not on his ship,” I said.

“It says so right here!” Midge thumped the book with his fist. “The captain dared the storms, and God appeared and damned him for it. That’s the story there, Tom. Like it or not, we’re on the
Dutchman
. We’ll spend the rest of our days plucking souls from the sea.”

I laughed at his notions. But soon enough, I came to wonder if he wasn’t right.

That night there were more stars in the sky than I had
ever seen. In their glow the horizon was crisp and flat. I could see a castle of ice floating miles away. The sea was so calm, the ship so steady, that I dreamed that night I was on solid ground.

Yet I soon woke to the eerie sound of wind in the rigging, half a moan and half a song. The ladles and pans that hung from the cookhouse walls were all at a slant, swaying as the ship plunged through the waves. There was a roar of water, and a motion that made me queasy.

Midgely was already awake. I said, “The sea’s getting rough.”

“No, it’s the ship.” There was a smile on his face. “She’s sailing again.”

He was right, as I learned when I stepped out of the cookhouse. Sails that had flapped from their stays now bulged with wind, pulling nicely. The ship leapt through the waves, flinging spray from the bow that pattered all over the deck. It was the sort of sailing my father had loved, and I could picture him grinning out across the sea with his clothes in a flap and his salt-covered beard in a tangle.

I imagined that a shift in the wind had sorted out the sails. But it certainly seemed that a ghostly crew had gone aloft to set and trim the canvas, missing only the main topsail. High above the deck, it was strangled and throttled by snarls of rope, flailing in the wind.

With the decks at a slant, the seas roaring by, we began to hear again the knockings in the ship. They followed each shuddering blast of a breaking wave, and came in chorus with the terrible moans from the timbers and planks. We
could see the masts shaking, and hear the slosh of water rising in the bilge, but those moans sounded too human to come from mere wood.

Through the day we stormed along. But at nightfall the wind eased again, and the ship passed slowly through a field of ice. The southern sky lit up in glowing beams and arcs of light, so that the heavens seemed to cloak themselves in shimmering colors. The strange light played on the ice, and Midgely nearly cried because he couldn’t see the shining castles and the slabs.

In the morning the field was behind us. There was only one bit of ice to be seen, and it lay straight ahead. A thick slab with a hummock in the middle, it was not very big, nor very tall, but it stood out plainly on the ocean. The hummock was stained a deep red, as though the ice still held the glow of heavenly lights.

Not until we were up close did I see that the ice was stained with blood, and that on its back rode a pair of ragged men.

My skin crawled at the sight of the men on their icy raft. A trick of wind and tide might have brought us together, but for a moment I believed that Midge was right, and that his
Flying Dutchman
was very real.

In that instant I didn’t doubt that the ship would stop of its own accord, and the men would join us, and off we’d go to somewhere else. We gathered at the base of the big bowsprit, with no one at the wheel. Weedle’s red sash whipped round his waist in the wind.

We saw white puffs rising from the ice, and thought the men were signaling with guns, though we never heard the cracking sound of the shots.

Each minute brought us thirty yards or so toward the ice.
Each minute made the scene before us more strange and terrible.

The two men stood at the low summit of their little island, not six feet above the sea. It seemed at first that they were dancing, for they reeled round and round at the top of the ice, their arms waving, their feet kicking. It seemed the fury of their dancing set their small world tilting to and fro beneath them. But it was really the ice that moved the men, and their dance was only a struggle to keep their balance. All around them the sea was white with froth, and great black fish kept bursting from the foam, battering at the ice.

I had to explain it for Midgely, who must have doubted my every word. “Fish don’t come out of the water,” he said.

Well, these ones did. They were long and fat, their black hides mottled by patches of white. From their backs rose enormous triangular fins, while their gaping mouths were full of teeth that a bear would have envied. Puffs of white spray shot up from the tops of their heads, scattering away on the wind.

Those black fish, like small whales but fierce as wolves, hurtled right from the water and crashed their bellies on the ice. Their tails churning the water, they drove themselves up onto the little island, until their own weight tipped them over, and they went rolling back to the sea.

The cold island, streaked with blood, rocked wildly in the attack of the black fish. At the summit the two men turned round and round to face each one. They had guns, but apparently no powder, for they were using their weapons like clubs, to bash at the heads of the creatures.

There was so much blood on the ice that the men must
have killed or injured one of the black fish. I imagined they’d been fighting for days, balanced at the top of their pitching island as the fish charged up again and again.

I called out as we shouldered our way toward them. The shadows of the sails raced ahead of us, over the foamy crests of the waves, over the ice and the black fish.

Like wolves at the coming of the shepherd, the creatures scattered and fled. At last the men looked up, and the sight of the ship suddenly looming above them must have been startling indeed. They cowered from it at first.