The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

clearly and quite loudly. Then the evil thing withdrew. Never have I felt so relieved at the departure of an unwanted guest as I was by that one. The electric light on the table, throwing its warm, yellow circle of light on the dark blue cloth, the books on the shelves, the luminous clock, the barometer, the coffee percolator, the chairs, a pair of sea- boots, an old sweater, an etching of New York on the bulkhead, all these things seemed so friendly and clinging, as if they had resented the intruder as much as myself. For there was no doubt of the meaning conveyed in that one word “Tomorrow”. A whole sentence had been condensed, with evil intent, into that word. It had said, in fact, “Tomorrow you will die an unpleasant death.” Now, death is a fearful thing, and often terrible, and much has been thought and written on the subject, but it has never preoccupied my mind. We are hedged in with platitudes about death . . . we must all die – that makes death seem easier and less important. The poems of Beddoes I have always found funny. Death held no special terrors for me, I’m convinced. But there was something in that evil experience which shook me. Not so much the personal, unpleasant message as the feeling that swept through me that this had been a devil’s voice, and if the workings of this curious world were controlled by devils, then life was the most wretched affair, human kind the saddest creation, children merely sent into the world to mock a man with. This was diametrically opposed to what I had always believed to be true. To have trusted such a voice would have been to banish God and render Christ ridiculous. “If I am to die tomorrow,” I said to myself, “why can I not be informed by an angel, or one of the fates, or the ghost of an angry saint, if I must be told supernaturally? Why must I be told by this evil, sneaking, contemptible thing?” That gave me hope, for there was something gossipy, hearsay and underhand about that voice. I went on to the bridge.

“Hullo,” I said.

“Hullo,” said Jimmy.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “You look white.”

“Do I?” Jimmy gave a direction down the voice-pipe. “If I do it’s because I feel a bit sick. Just had a bit of a scare. Don’t know what it was. Got the creeps. But it’s O.K. now.”

I was silent for a moment and looked round the horizon. It was getting dark, and all land had disappeared.

“How’s the barometer?” I asked.

“Steady.”

The Peter was beginning to roll a little – not an unusual occurrence even in a calm sea. But I didn’t like the soft sighing sound in the rigging. I do not think there is a more melancholy lonely sound in the world than that whine of wind on wires and ropes. Curious, but sometimes you hear it, and it makes you shiver, when you can hardly feel a breath of wind on your face. The air round the ship seemed quite gentle, but the sighing was there unmistakably. Then suddenly a hard, bleak puff of wind screamed down, turning the small black waves white, tugging at one’s hair, the flag, sending doors banging, lifting the heavy canvas lashed over the hold, raising the sadness in the rigging to a screech, and passing as swiftly as it had come. Oh, that depressing sound, and the cold, leaden splash of the bow wave breaking on the night sea! I sent for a duffel coat and remained on the bridge.

At 20.30 the wind, such as it was, came from a north-westerly direction. Six minutes later it changed abruptly and increased. By a quarter to nine it was blowing gale force from the south. In this part of the world the dangerous winds are reputed to be the northerly ones, so I thought little of it. It was a nuisance and was going to mean a bad night unless it slackened. Almost perceptibly the waves increased in height from four or five feet to twelve. Within another half hour they were fifteen feet; that is, as high as the bridge. Coming right on the starboard beam, we rolled heavily.

“How’s the barometer?”

“Dropped two points since six o’clock.”

We altered course five degrees to starboard to make allowance for the beam sea. Jimmy turned in to get some sleep, but within half an hour was up again.

“It’s a bastard, isn’t it!” he said. He stood by me, and then added, “They are getting bigger, aren’t they?” They certainly were getting bigger, and also increasingly difficult to see in the darkness. As he said it the signalman, whose cap had gone in the wind, but who continued to hold a hand to his head, as if to keep that in place, cried out, “Look at this one, sir! Bet it’s twenty foot or more.” The monster of a wave looked as if it might crush us, but the Peter lifted herself, swayed to an alarming angle, and rode lightly over. A motor mechanic, an ill-shaped little fellow from Glasgow, put his face up the companion-way. “ ’Scuse me, sir, we going on?” “Yes, Mickey Mouse.” Mickey Mouse whistled and slid down the steps.

At 23.00 we saw the black, low shape of Z. We were much closer than I had expected, and on the wrong side. So we altered course for a while and rode more easily with the sea astern. Z. having been put in its right place, we continued on our way. The spray, which was being whipped off the water, was getting hellish. Shortly before midnight we were in the narrow waters that divide K. from Z. Here, considering we were almost hemmed in by islands, we expected to find some abatement. There was none. The lightning broke out in a vivid pink flash and we saw clearly, for the first time, exactly how enormous the waves were. It seemed odd that they should race at this size into this almost protected area. What I had not realised was the deterioration of the weather outside the islands. Within the past half hour, on the weather side of Z., which was in fact offering us stout protection, had begun the greatest storm in living memory in these stormy parts. The Peter was increasingly difficult to handle, her bow continuously swinging away from the wind, and she wouldn’t answer to the helm even when hard over. To turn her into those giant waves and that roaring wind we had to go full ahead on the engines, which nearly shook her to pieces, or play one engine off against the other, putting the outboard full ahead and the inboard half astern. The spray took the form of a rushing mist, which, seen in the lightning, had all the qualities of a nightmare. We wallowed down past K. bay. No bonfires. No red lanterns – though if they had lit twenty we should never have seen them. In any case, we could never have reached the jetty. The sea was tumbling from all sides, and I heard later the jetty had been carried away. Mercilessly our stern was lifted thirty feet in the air and then our bows, thirty feet in the air into this pink, hail-like mist, and then we were dropped with a sickening thud. To have used oil would have been sensible, but the movement of the ship was so violent it was impossible for a man to shift his position. To have gone on deck was certain death; where you were you stayed, holding on for very life.

We turned back. So far as any direction was possible we headed towards the south-west. I had no desire on arriving back at the far coast, to find myself on the wrong side of the front line of battle. The ship could not be steered in any sense of the word. All we could do was to try keep the heavy seas on the port bow. I must say the Peter rode them magnificently.

A few minutes after midnight there was a sound like a muffled pistol-shot heard above the deafening roar. I didn’t see it go, but it was the wireless mast.

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