Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills

I

The Pirara is a garrulous old hooker, proud of her departed days and fond of reminiscing to me during the night watches below. At times she is querulous, too, complaining of the cargoes of rancid copra she must carry in her old age; of the native passengers who mess up her decks, tie awnings of patchwork quilts to the rigging, and whittle their initials in the rail; or of the parsimony of her owners, who refuse to buy a new winch — the old one is in a sorry plight — or replace the rusty old foretopmast stay. She even growls at me, her mate, though the Lord knows that I do my best; but it is hard to keep awake on clear nights during the twelve-to-four watch.

“Lackadaisy!” she groaned to-night, breaking into my dreams. “This is a lubber’s shift! Rancid copra bulging my poor old ribs; engine-room grease and bilge water washing over my kelson. Why don’t you pay a little attention to the pumps? You haven’t sounded my well for a week! Fine mate you are for such a lady as me!”

“That is unfair!” I cried in my sleep. “You know that I watched Six-Seas pumping during the dog-watch.”

The old schooner laughed derisively. “What a fib!” she cried. “Watched, indeed! You sat on the wheel box twiddling your thumbs, and you took Six-Seas’ word for it when he said the pumps had sucked!” Then sharply, not giving me time to reply: “Don’t say anything! Not a word out of you! You’ll only lie and make me angry, and that’ll be bad for your soul and my digestion!”

She fell silent as she wallowed in a long trough; then, with a groan — more from habit than anything else; for, like all old folks, she makes much of her troubles — she rose to the top of a long sea and lumbered down the other side.

“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.

“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.

Seaside felt the awe of the unknown gnaw his bones; his knees weakened and his skin became clammy as he picked his way deep into the jungle, climbing over the trunks of fallen giants, stumbling into crab holes, sinking into quagmires of guano and decayed vegetation. He kept clear of the trunks of the trees, for, he said, they swarmed with rats and crabs climbing to the roosting birds to feed on their eggs and young. Often he could see fights carried on between them, when the boobies would pounce on the rats that were sucking their eggs, tear them from the limbs, and hurl them to the ground; or screaming birds would dive at and circle about a coconut crab that held a fledgling in its claws. It was a horrible scene of carnage that had been carried on for thousands of years — a death struggle between the species.

On into the island went Seaside, his boxes under his arms, hunting for an open space by the eastern beach where the terns should lay their eggs. The gloom of the jungle deepened, the air became rank and nauseating with the stench of sea birds’ droppings, decaying flesh, damp vegetation. And the deeper he penetrated the more alive the ground became with evil creeping things.

Suddenly he halted in panic terror, his hair on end and his eyes bulging. Directly in front of him, hanging by a long rope of bark, was a dead man! A few rags of cloth hung to him, a sailor cap sat jauntily on his head. He must have been long dead. Seaside shuddered when he told me that one arm had dropped off; its yellowed bones lay, rat-gnawed, on the ground.

Seaside did not know how long he stood staring at the dead man; but when he did regain enough courage to move he turned with a yell, dropped his boxes, and rushed wildly through the jungle, hunting for the outer beach! He must have run in circles, for an hour passed and still he was in the depth of the island. It seemed that the jungle, with its millions of loathsome creatures feeding on one another, had no end. Twice again he came upon the dead man, each time to increase his terror and send him rushing wildly away.

Several hours passed, when suddenly, it seemed, darkness closed about him, dense and impenetrable. The blackness pressed him from all sides as though a sable shroud had been thrown over him and he had been sunk deep in the sea. He staggered a few feet forward and bumped against a tree. A rat dropped on his head and ran down his body. All about him he could hear sharp squeals, the clicking of the crabs’ claws, and, above, the clamor of the birds, though they were quieter now except when a rat or a crab crept upon their young — then the air would be alive with their screams.

Seaside sank on his knees at the foot of the tree. Gradually he became calmer. “After all,” he reasoned, “the crabs and the rats can’t kill me; the worst that can happen will be a sleepless night on this island.” He felt a little better after this, but still far from easy. He told me an hour must have passed before he saw the ghost of Able-bodied Seaman Alexander Perks.

He had been staring into the darkness, his eyes shifting from side to side, when all at once a nebulous thing formed a few yards from him, danced back and forth among the trees, and then gradually took the shape of a man. It approached to within a few feet, bowed extravagantly, and lifted its hat. Seaside said that the jungle became aglow with an eerie light which disclosed the dead man a few feet to one side, swinging slightly now, while a dozen rats below his feet were leaping into the air, trying to get at him. After this Seaside lost cognizance of things.

When he came to, there was Perks, sitting on one of the boxes that he had brought ashore for eggs, talking in the hollow tone common among ghosts. “It’s a shame,” he was saying, “a beastly shame!”

Seaside snapped his eyes closed and started repeating the Lord’s Prayer, but still he could hear Perks muttering: “I see you’ve come to, now. It’s about time. ’Ere I’ve been marooned fer four years on this blinkin’ island, and the first bloke as comes ’asn’t the courtesy to treat me wid common civility. So strike me pink if it ain’t a shame!”

Seaside opened one eye a fraction of an inch. He noted that the specter appeared to have a kindly face; but he was far from reassured, so he snapped his eyes shut again and started trembling violently as again he went over the prayer.

“Prayin’, so ’elp me, prayin’!” moaned Perks. “But I suppose it is queer-like to see a man o’ my profession — Able-bodied Seaman I am, Alexander Perks, A.B. — on a bloomin’ island like this. But it’s all right, matey, I’m ’armless — only a poor marooned mariner wot’s died by ’is own ’and after two years of lonely and pathetic life on this blinkin’ desert island.”

Seaside opened both his eyes at this, for he felt sorry for the spirit. He had seen plenty of ghosts before, and though they always filled him with terror he realized that there were both the harmless and the vicious kinds.

“It must have been lonely,” he managed to gasp.

“Lonely ain’t no word fer it,” Perks said with a shake of his head. “It’s been unsocial as ’ell. I’ve been livin’ a retired and ’omeless life widout even a bloke to play draughts wid!”

Here Seaside saw tears stream down the poor fellow’s cheeks. “You like to play draughts?” he asked, his fright now gone.

The ghost’s eyes brightened with an unearthly light. “It’s been my lifelong ’abit,” he replied, “and even since my late and lamented end it bides by me.” After a moment’s silence a wistful glow appeared in his eyes; he leaned forward and asked: “Matey, you don’t ’appen, let’s say, to play draughts, do you? I’ve the most ’andsome checkerboard on the north beach, beamy and symmetrical.”

Seaside told him that he played a game now and then, whereupon the ghost insisted that they go to the beach and play. Of course this suited the old native, for at least it would mean their getting out of the foul damp air of the jungle. He rose and followed Perks, who drifted among the trees, leaving a ghostly light behind him by which Seaside could with difficulty pick his way. In the course of a half hour they broke through the trees to the clean white outer beach, sparkling with moonlight and swept by a fine breeze from off the sea. Perks stopped before a large slab of coral.

“Ain’t it ’andsome?” he asked. “I marked the squares wid octopus ink, as you can see, and my men are black shells and white ones; only when I makes a king I turns ’im oyer instead of pilin’ one on top of tother, they being too round-like to stand. But I ain’t ’ad a game since my sad end, it bein’ against nature fer a ghost to move the men. Before my decease I played myself.”

“That must have been a tiresome game,” Seaside ventured.

“Strike me pink, but it was awful,” Perks said; “always winning from myself, one way or t’other! It got so discouragin’, never winning a game decisive-like, that I put an end to it all and done away wid myself!”

They sat with the slab between them and started a game, Seaside moving Perks’ men for him. One game after the other he lost to the ghost, sometimes no more than getting a single man to the king row. The night waned, but still they played. Perks became more and more excited over the game; he would scream like a banshee when he won, and an evil glint would come into his eyes when he jumped three men at once or slipped into a saddle between two of Seaside’s men. They were near the end of their twentieth game when dawn broke. Gradually Perks dissolved in the morning light, and his voice became fainter until it was lost in a scarcely audible moan which told Seaside of another game he had lost.

The old native looked up from the checkerboard. The sun was just breaking above the horizon; in the offing lay the Pirara, her boat over the side and not twenty yards from the reef.

Seaside told me there was the devil to pay when he met Captain Andy and tried to explain why he had no birds’ eggs and why he hadn’t been on the reef the evening before. He mentioned something about being delayed by a ghost; but at this the captain flew off the handle, cursing all superstitious sailors to Gehenna and back again. Seaside stood it as long as he could; then slunk forward and told his story to the sailors. They all knew it was true, and sympathized mightily.

But the strange thing was that, as soon as he came on deck the next night to stand his watch, there was Alexander Perks waiting for him, smiling and bowing and lifting his hat and suggesting a game of draughts. The old gentleman had stowed away, slipping into the ship’s boat under cover of daylight!

Seaside broke from his story, turned quickly and said: “All right, Perks, I’m coming.”

A cold shiver ran down my back. There, not six feet away, was a strange misty thing, bowing extravagantly and lifting his hat. I shook myself to dispel the illusion; then turned aft, refusing to glance toward the thing for several moments, for I don’t believe in ghosts and don’t want my convictions shaken by hallucinations. When I did turn, both Seaside and the imaginary Perks were gone.

IV

“Lackadaisy!” the old Pirara groaned while I was putting in my twelve-to-four watch below. “Death comes to old and young alike.”

“What a hackneyed thing to say!” I replied sharply — the old hooker had nearly wakened me. “You might be a little more original.”

“Patience, my son,” she went on, a note of true pathos in her voice. “You should be more considerate of the dying.”

“Dying?”

“Alas, yes; my day has come, and now I find myself so close to Christening Grooves that—”

“Christening Grooves! What’s that?”

“Such ignorance! It’s the paradise for dead ships, where every morning the ghost ships waken on the grooves of launching, stout, tight, shining with paint and varnish and polished brass. Every morning the crowds are there, watching fair maidens break bottles of champagne on the ghost ships’ bows. Then everybody cheers while the band plays ‘Life on the Ocean Wave,’ the cameras click, and; the ships slip gracefully into the water!”

“And every morning it happens all over again?”

“Every morning.”

“Why do you moan about dying, then?”

“Death is a sad thing,” the old lady sighed. “For instance, all of you, whom I have learned to love, will probably perish at sea! Alas! You shouldn’t have allowed Mr. Perks to go ashore!”

I shuddered in my sleep as I queried, “Perks ashore?”

“Of course,” she replied. “He’s back on Vostok Island again. He went ashore with Seaside this morning when the captain sent him after birds’ eggs. Why, even the rats were trying to jump into the boat!”

“Then we’re lost!” I cried in my sleep.

The old lady became sarcastic. “Don’t let that trouble you,” she murmured. “Fiddler’s Green is quite as good a paradise for sailors as is Christening Grooves for ships.”

She chuckled to herself.

“One bell! One bell! Ropati tané!” came Seaside’s senile whine, followed by the scratching on the cabin port.

I jumped from my berth and ran on deck. “Seaside, you old fool!” I shouted. “Is it true that Perks went ashore with you?”

The old sinner grinned and nodded his head in affirmation.

Twenty-four hours later we were all in the reef boat, watching the Pirara plunge to Christening Grooves before we started pulling the hundred and twenty miles back to Vostok Island.