It was winter in the darkest, dirtiest, dankest, most ramshackle waterfront dive you can imagine. It was in that hole that my tale begins.
Who am I, you wonder? Call me John. That works about as good as anything these days. John. Pierre. Ishmail. Hey you. I answer to all, and always have since I first poured weak drinks in Gil’s Dive. I was there when Billy Haddock and his Squid Squad put the screws to that old man. Billy was about as bad as they come- a real piece of work, and not the good kind. His Squid Squad- twelve of the meanest, nastiest critters ever to crawl out of a woman’s womb- were famous up and down the quays for their vicious tempers, razored knives, and their willingness to use them.
You see, Billy was worse than all his boys put together. An incredibly arrogant and foul-tempered man, he was one mean son of a bitch. And he has special talents as well, like he could smell gold. That was what kept him as the Alpha Male in that gang of thieves, and what led to his demise. He caught that lustrous scent on that old fisherman.
Now, it ain’t often a fisherman smells like gold. But it ain’t unheard of, either. More than one old salt pulled up a net of herring to find a chest or the bejeweled skeleton of some old pirate caught in the rig. Most of the time the treasure is just junk, the bones coral or other natural sea-bottom things, but there has been a time or two in the legends that a true treasure was hauled up out of the deep. Billy knew the stories, and Billy could smell gold. His nose twitched, and that sealed the fate of the old man. He and his boys grabbed him, threw him into the chair, plopped a stale beer in front of him, and commanded him to talk.
Of course the old man knew nothing. The harbormaster had directed him to a pier far from his usual one, and that meant he had to pass by Gil’s Dive to get home. That was what he did when rough hands grabbed him and thrust him into the chair. His white hair was wild from the salty spray of Mother Ocean, and his rheumy blue eyes yet wilder from the manhandling.
“I said talk, you wrinkled fart,” Billy Haddock said. “And you damned well know what I am talking about.”
The old man cringed. In his day he was broad of shoulder and packed with muscles earned by hauling up heavy nets filled with shrimp and herring- by hand. Now machines manned by men like Billy Haddock do the hard work, and the old man’s once proud muscles atrophied as his bones bent with the years. In his day he was a man to be reckoned with- but that day was long past.
“You best do as the man say,” whispered Lyle Camara, Billy’s Number Two. A dark little shit with a big knife and a ready smile, he was forever a toothy thorn in a decent man’s hide. “Billy knows you hiding something, cracker. You come clean, and maybe he lets you walk out of here with yo body intact.”
“Spill it, pruneface,” commanded Henk Jenkins, the other mouthy one of the crew. Like Lyle, he was a little shit with a big weapon. And like Billy, he was fish-belly white from a nocturnal life. But unlike Haddock who had a wild head of hair like a harpy, Henk’s scalp lay as bare as an eagle’s egg. And his choice of weapon was not a blade, but a pistol. He was often muttering about dumb shits who died bringing a knife to a gunfight. This was often said where Lyle could hear, which did nothing to ease the tension between them.
The old man glanced rapidly from leader to deputy to bad-ass then back again. Every time his eyes landed on a hoodlum, he cringed further and further away. But he eventually ran out of room in that squalid chair, and a rough hand slapped the back of his head to end the charade.
“Talk,” Billy ordered. “And don’t you dare try that ‘I don’t know anything’ routine. I know better.”
The old man straightened up. It looked as if he finally found his courage, but the thugs knew better. It was the act of a doomed man trying to find some dignity, nothing more.
“Talk,” Billy repeated, but softer.
The old man glared at him. “I know what you think you want. And I know what I know. Those two ain’t the same thing. Just so you know.”
“What is the old fart babbling about?” Lyle asked. His thumb ran over the edge of his knife as he spoke. A small red line formed.
Billy grinned cruelly as he ignored his lieutenant. “Is that so? Why don’t you just tell me what it is you do know,” he said, leaning closer to the old man, “and I’ll decide whether it is what I want to know or not.”
The old man spat onto the table. “Fine. I fished up a bell. A ship’s bell. When I saw what was carved on it, I threw it back, said all fifteen prayers I know as I winched in my other nets, and got the hell away from there.”
Lyle fingered his knife. This time the thin line was welling red. He smiled at the wound he did not feel. “And where was this bell at?”
The old man smiled gleefully. All five of his teeth were showing in the dim candlelight. I was shivering where I was standing- and that was in the corner farthest from that bunch.
“Where was the bell found?” he corrected, a grammar nazi to the end. “That is known only to the heavens, to myself, and to the ghosts who dwell in the wreck from whence it came. The way it ought to be.”
“He found theJuanita Piñata,” Henk gasped. “He found the cursed Spanish galleon!”
“The JP was loaded with gold and silver ingots when she went down four hundred years ago,” Billy recalled. “Many have searched, but none have ever found her. It is said she went down in a terrible storm, blown clear across the ocean to these parts where she dropped into the deep.”
“I heard she was pillaged, and sunk by those pillaging her,” Lyle recalled. “Them Spanish got their shiny butts kicked by youse English fellows, who took the gold.”
“That gold never made it to any king or queen,” Billy reminded him. “English or Spanish. No privateer ever registered it, nor did any pirate ever spend so much as a single Spanish doubloon. No, the JP rests off these blighted shores, her crew fed the fishes long ago, and her gold lays within her rotting timbers, untouched by salt or sea. And this old man knows where she lies.”
“She survived the storm and the sea, but fell to Vikings,” the old man said. “The gold you seek went north into foreign lands, never to be seen by southerners again. Some of them Vikings went down with her, and guard what is left of her with their spirits. Only a fool would disturb them.”
Haddock laughed. He threw his head back and roared his laughter. I thought the roof would come down from the noise, but it did not. Then Haddock squinted a steely grey eye at the old man and brought his face real close. “Vikings died out a thousand years ago, you fool. The Spanish lost their gold four hundred years ago. Simple math says there weren’t no Vikings about when the JP went down.”
The old man smirked smugly. “So you say.”
Haddock slammed his fist down on the table. The old man jumped.
“Tell me where you found it!” he barked. “No more games, old man. My patience wears thin. Tell me now, and you will live. Otherwise I will let Lyle here gut you like a fish.”
“I can’t tell you,” the old man stammered. “My Loran-C never worked, and one bit of ocean looks pretty much like another.”
“Then you are going to die.”
The old man held up his hands in surrender. “I can’t tell you, but I can take you. I will never forget the feel of that place. I can find it again.”
“You had better,” Billy said. Then the bastard noticed me polishing glasses behind the counter, deep in the shadows of the bar. He had forgotten me, for which I was grateful. Now he jerked his head toward me and said to his goons, “I forgot about him. No witnesses.”
“Fishfood?”
Billy shook his head, for which I am eternally grateful. “Nah, he makes a good Tequila Sunrise. Bring him along. We can always feed the fishes with him later, or use him to demonstrate to the old man what happens when people mislead Billy Haddock.”
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The bastards hauled us down to their boat and threw us on board. The old man was hustled to the pilot house, while I was cast below into the filthiest galley I had ever seen and ordered quite bluntly to “make some sammiches, bitch.” While I was feeding these buzzards, the boat moved and I knew we were leaving the harbor. Neither me nor that old man would ever see it again. I was sure of it, as sure as there was blood on the hands of Lyle Camara and Billy Haddock.
It puzzled me why Billy would take us out in his boat, and not use that of the old man. I mean, people wouldn’t say anything no matter what he did, so why use his own fuel?
I got my answer after the bastards ate their fill, and threw scraps to me to bring to the pilot house. One of them, a bruiser called Phil, escorted me to where Billy and the old man stood by the wheel. Carl, another bruiser, was assembling an old Sten gun. A loaded one already lay by his side. The sight scared me. Why do they need two Stens? Or three, I thought, as I noticed more parts in the bag. Anyway, Carl finished his assembly and left, being relieved by Phil. I was thrown into a corner and forgotten.
I awoke to a beautiful sight. Not as lovely as Billy Haddock hanging from a gibbet, but one more beautiful in an aesthetic sense. The skies had cleared, and ahead was a full moon. The running lights on haddock’s tub were out; there was nothing outside to mar the beauty of billions of stars joining the moon to reflect off of the still waters. It was lovely, if monochrome, and made me realize why so many men discard life ashore to work out here. It was breathtaking.
“I am sorry you got roped into this,” the old man whispered. He had evidently heard my gasp at the sight outside, though the two goons Billy left guarding us slept through it. Maybe it was the hum of the motors that lulled them asleep, or maybe the past-due mayonnaise I buttered their sandwiches with.
“Wrong place, wrong time,” I said with a shrug. It was not his fault we were going to die.
“What do you know of theJulietta Perrault?” he asked.
My face was a blank.
“You Cornish call it the Juanita Piñata,” the old man continued. “It exists in every culture, or at least English, Cornish, Irish, and French. I think maybe even the Norwegians have it as well. No matter the land, all have one thing in common. The ship’s name was two words, one beginning with J, the other with P.”
“I only know what Haddock said back at Gil’s,” I replied honestly. “A Spanish treasure ship that was blown off course from the Caribbean and sank somewhere over on our side of the ocean. One survivor made it to shore. He had gone mad, so nobody trusted his tale.”
“Close enough,” the old man grunted. “So you know why we are in Haddock’s boat, and not mine, eh?”
Suddenly it came to me. Haddock was a fisherman when he had to, a salvager when he could. The old man’s fishing boat could only haul up and cast nets, while the cutter Billy Haddock used carried diving equipment and winches. Haddock believed the old man found the wreck of the JP, and was going to bury them both in the hull he will empty once his boat was floating atop the site where she went down.
“You know what a piñata is, kid?” the old man asked. I knew it some kind of Spanish toy, but not what. He saw that, and enlightened me. “It is a decoration filled with goodies. A blindfolded kid smacks it with a stick to break it open. This wreck is aptly named.”
I gulped. Around us, a cold mist rose and grew thicker. A chill set in that tickled my very bones. I shivered, and the old man laughed.
“We are almost there. Stick close, kid, and obey my words if you want to see another dawn. Now kick the goons awake. We are almost there.”
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Billy Haddock lurched into the pilot house with a pistol in his hand, ready for use. He glanced outside and saw naught but grey as the moonlit mist shrouded the vessel. He then glanced at his nav system- but that displayed a dizzying array of spinning numbers- never once pausing. An experienced sailor would note latitudes and longitudes ranging from the North Pole to the South Pole, and from Greenwich Mean to Peking China. Then he looked at the sonar display, which was an empty as a two-bit whore’s head. The Webley handgun rose toward the old man’s head.
The old man laughed, then pointed outside.
“We are where you wanted me to take you, Mr Haddock,” he said, “though I did warn you that it was not where you wanted to be.”
Billy began to squeeze his trigger when he abruptly stopped and tilted the revolver to the ceiling while easing the hammer down. I followed his gaze out into the thick fog, and my brain will never forget the sight I saw then. An ancient galleon, rigged in tatters, bulled through the mist to collide side-against-side with Haddock’s cutter.
“Don’t just stand there gawking, Haddock,” the old man wheezed. “Get a line on her before she drifts back into the fog and you lose her forever.”
Haddock and his men sprang to life. Ropes were pulled from lockers and bound quickly into loose nooses, then cast at the wooden ship. Enough of them caught onto objects to provide some help, and the old man had thrown the cutter into reverse just at the collision. Between the two, the ships merged into a single dark knot in the grey. There was a name barely visible on her bow. Most of the letters were faded into oblivion, but two stood out vividly in the midnight moonlight. JP.
Phil Shadd lifted his Sten gun and swung it to cover us. The thugs had the JP. We were now expendable. I felt my bladder bursting, but the old man smiled and winked to the Loran-C nav system. Haddock smacked the gun to the sky with a curse.
“You fool,” he shouted to his gunman. “Unless you were following his course closely, which I doubt you did in your sleep, that old man is the only one who knows where we are and how to get back. If you kill him now, I will personally throw you to the sharks.”
“I don’t like this, boss,” Shadd stammered. “The JP is a wreck- a sunken wreck. Yet here she be, bound to our boat. She’s a ghost ship, boss. Its bad mojo to mess with a ghost ship!”
“Evidently people believed it to be a sunken wreck,” Haddock explained as if to a child, “because that Spanish survivor said she went down. Maybe he abandoned her- he was crazy, after all, and she has been following wind and wave ever since?”
“For five hundred years?” Shadd shouted.
Haddock moved like lightning. I could see once again the prowess and strength that made him the leader of this gang of cold killers. He picked up Shadd bodily and threw him onto the other ship.
Shadd landed with a loud thunk, and jumped to his feet to find Haddock pointing the Webley at him.
“Are you wet or dry?” he asked sternly.
Shadd glanced down. He was on a deck covered in algae and moss, but a solid dry deck for that.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.
“Oh, you will be,” whispered the old man.
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Haddock ordered his men to board the ancient galleon once it was firmly secured to his boat. To make sure the Spanish ship stayed tied up, he threw me and the old man onto the strange vessel as well. Maybe he knew we would untie the boat and make off into the night while he was away, or maybe he did not trust his own knots in tying us up. The one thing I did know, was that he could not simply kill us now to secure his treasure. The old man had made that plain to him with a wink to the Loran navigation that was still spinning crazily and another to the fuel gauge.
“We used a little over a third getting here,” he said casually, “and she was a third empty when we started out. I figure if one knows where we are now and where we are going, and can reckon without the aid of that compass which is spinning worse than the radio doo-hickey, one could just about make it to port. But if one is wrong… Well, a boat can stay afloat going in landless circles for a long long time. Just look at the JP.”
Then he smiled wickedly. “How much food do you have on this tub, Haddock? Better yet, how much fresh water? Have you ever seen a man thirst to death? A horrid thing. Horrid.”
“Shut up,” Haddock ordered, but the point was made. The old man had led them to the treasure ship, but had done so in such a way that they were now dependent on him to get them back. All the gold in the world was as dust when the water supply was bone dry. Salt mist can create a powerful thirst. Already some of the lads were feeling a bit parched.
With a jerk of his head, Haddock ordered us onboard the wreck. The ship was dark as a whore’s heart, and the moon barely penetrated the shield of mist. I could make out the gunwales and a mast, but little else. I simply followed the noise of the thugs moving. Eventually we found a stairs leading up, to what some were already bawling was the forecastle, and a stairs up on the other side as well. Between the two was a doorway blacker than the rest. It is into this maw of the ship that Phil Shadd and Lyle Camara went.
The rest of us followed.
A lantern was found and ignited. Amazingly it still had fuel, and lit up a corridor leading back toward the aft, which would put us in the hold before we got that far, I hoped. I wanted this nightmare to end.
A door ahead opened. I shivered, thinking it swinging creepily open to devour us, yet by the light and shadows I realized it was only Shadd doing his best to be quiet. It creaked open to reveal a forest of shadows and tangled vines.
“The hold,” Haddock stated, unnecessarily. “Find the chests.”
He ought not to have said that.
No sooner did the words leave his lips than a glow in the ceiling was born, and grew. By the golden light spreading throughout the ceiling, we could see the shadows and vines resolve themselves into forms and ropes.
The forms were human. Some of them were clumped into groups, fine statues of people in conversation. Others sat along the wall as if patrons of a bar. At the edge of the light I could see a statue of a man with his arms raised. He had huge eyes, though the pupils were slitted like a serpent. And in the corner was a female statue, plainly garbed in a simple robe, reclining on a low couch.
The thugs raised their weapons at first sight, then lowered them as they realized they would be spraying lead into marble, a useless waste of valuable ammunition. Valuable, you say? Bullets cost little. To this I would agree, but value is relative. If you have only the bullets you have on your person and get into a firefight, each bullet becomes very valuable as without it your gun no longer goes bang and becomes but a hunk of iron. If you had a rucksack filled with bullets, you could shoot all day long. The thugs had no backpacks and only a few had thought to bring a spare magazine.
But I digress. Statues are no threat, despite the eerie and unexplained glow spreading across the ceiling. A light-emitting fungus maybe? The biologist in me was fascinated. From somewhere an electric crackle emerged- had an unseen storm arisen outside, causing static here? The strange hum accompanying it could be water along the hull, dampened by the wood through which the sound might travel. I was in awe at the spectacle and how it came to be, but the old man was not. He must have seen this before, because he suddenly grabbed me and threw me to the floor.
“Cover your eyes and do not move,” he whispered.
I felt him on the floor beside me. None of the thugs had noticed, or if they did, they did not care. Their eyes were wide with the view, their fingers white on their weapons, only their trigger fingers along the trigger guards not tight with anxiety.
The crackle I heard earlier rose to a hectic pitch. The glow had reached all walls now, and the hum rose in volume to a soothing tune. I heard movement- and not that of the crew. I dared peek. The statues were moving, dancing to the relaxing strains of the melody surrounding us. Then the serpent-eyed statue by the far wall turned toward us and cried “Everyone attack!”
The statues rose and spun from their stations to charge the thugs en masse. Sten guns chattered and spat lead, pistols barked, and some of the assailants broke apart into debris. But the rest charged in. I heard the biting ring of metal striking stone and knew those without guns were fighting for their lives and losing. Bodies thudded all around, but I kept my head down and my eyes covered and quaked with fear there on the floor until no more sounds were made anywhere. It seemed to last an eternity.
The old man shook my shoulder. “Get up, kid,” he said. “Its over. We need to get hat and get gone.”
I released my head from the deathgrip in which I had held it and rose onto quaking feet. “What the hell was that?” I asked. A quick glance around me revealed the glow retreating, the statues where they were, though some were damaged, and six of Haddock’s crew were lifeless on the ground. Haddock was not among them.
The old man shook his head in wonder. “You did not recognize the situation, kid? You being young and all?”
I shook my head.
“The air was electric, so frightfully hectic,” he said. “And the music was soothing, and they all starting grooving.”
I was speechless, and completely clueless.
“The Man in the Back raised his hands to the sky, and had eyes as big as the sun, and the girl in the corner wanted no-one to ignore her because she thinks she is the passionate one. Then the man in the back screamed Everyone Attack-”
“And they turned it into a Ballroom Blitz,” I finished. The old man was right- I did recognize this. It was a song, just coming into fashion among us kids. “But how?”
“Haddock thinks this is his treasure ship,” the old man replied as he dragged me through the now-still statues. At this distance, they appeared more lifelike and almost translucent; definitely not stone as I had thought. “But I told him it was not what he thought. He didn’t listen. That mist, these beings… We are not on the JP, kid. We are in the Baths.”
“There must be hundreds of these creatures here,” I said in awe.
“There were, or will be,” the old man said sternly. “That fellow over there, with the snake eyes, that is Adder. He was king of this place back in the day.”
“And the woman over in the corner?” I asked. Suddenly the beings were not as frightening as they once were.
“Glory of Sparta,” he said. “She took over after Adder vanished. She was the one who warned me what Adder was planning. She vanished mysteriously just before the Banstick Kid came in.”
“Awesome,” I said.
“He comes later,” the old man spat. “We have to move now.”
We exited the baths, or the hold, or whatever that place was. A new room filled with smoke and shadows greeted me, but by now I had picked up on the old man’s signals. When he was relaxed and moved briskly, there was no danger. If he stiffened and moved like he needed a cane, then there was something to watch out for. Here he moved with feline ease.
“A Tavern?” I asked, examining the shadows. I saw what looked like shadowy human-like forms gathered around listening to an old minstrel of sorts telling a MidWinter’s Tale.
The old man nodded. “The Red Lion Tavern. Usually more active than this, but hey, they will keep the thugs in line. Two very powerful beings frequent this place and rule it with an iron hand, and a third is rumored to pop by from time to time as well. We should be safe enough here for the moment.”
We were, and only for a moment. Three of Haddock’s thugs blundered into the Tavern with eyes wide with fright and empty pistols in their hands, screaming hideously about a Dotkor and what not. The denizens sprang to life but dashed aside, and I soon saw to what the old man referred. The trouble-makers were smashed into a protoplasmic jelly with a gigantic mighty hammer that simply materialized in the air and fell upon them without warning.
“Bless EoJ,” the old man whispered. “Always on the ball.”
On the other side of the tavern was a door leading to the hold. The enclosed space with a hatch above could be nothing else. I started forward, but a wrinkled hand held me back. I was directed to look down- and saw there was no floor between us and the ladder leading to the hatch. There was no floor below that either. In fact, the hole seemed to go beyond the ship and into the depths of hell.
“Scruffles,” the old man whispered. “He never did finish it. Go around.”
I followed his hand, and saw that the floor circled about the bottomless hole and led to a small moonlit alcove beneath the ladder. There were three chests there. One was propped open, displaying an open sack of doubloons and some ingots beside it. I reached impulsively for a handful, but stopped when I saw the pirate laying beside it. Lyle Camara, with his own knife deep in his throat and his dead eyes horrifyingly wide open.
“Cursed gold,” the old man said. “Touch nothing here.”
I crossed myself. It seemed more apt than pissing myself, which was what I really wanted to do. Somehow the ancient ritual brought me peace and solace.
The old man pointed to the ladder leading to the hatch above. I understood- that was our exit. I climbed, and the old man followed.
I threw the hatch open and climbed out into the daylight. The wreck caught my eye and held it- she was as new! All the algae and moss was gone. A nudge from below caused me to stop my gawking at the shining teak decks and spotless oak masts and move aside to let the old man out. The old man had been hanging impatiently on the ladder below in the dark hold while I took in the massive change. I helped him out, and we both moved to the gleaming gunwales where a green and rolling landscape was flitting by.
I glanced to the opposite gunwale. There too the fog and mist was gone, replaced by rolling hills moving past. We were no longer on the open sea, but upon a fast-moving river. A canoe with three men zipped past.
"The River of Time," said the old man. He added with a cruel grin, "don't fall in here."
I shivered, suddenly chilled to my core. If we were on a river, a port was nearby. Haddock would no longer need us. We were expendable.
“Don’t you worry none about him,” the old man said, resting his forearms on the gunwales as he leaned forward to take in the view. He nodded toward an approaching vessel and its sister ship. “He is going to be too busy with those lads over there.”
I followed his gaze. My jaw could have hit the floor. Bearing down on our suddenly pristine galleon was a pair of oared dragonships, filled with armed and armored men from days long gone by waving swords and axes. The words of the old man in the tavern returned- this ship had been sacked by Vikings. It had been so before, and would be so again, now, in 1974.
The old man laughed cruelly. “Billy Haddock used up all his bullets on the spirits below, did he not? Oh lad, this is going to be interesting.”
Tommy Fisher, Benny Narwhal, and Stevie Minnows ran onto the deck from somewhere aft. Like the fellows in the Tavern, they were wild of eye and oblivious to the serenity passing by. They were terrified beyond their wit’s end, a fitting party of patients to keep a team of psychiatrists and psychologists busy for decades. Their blabbering about the Dotkor was replaced by living statues (ho-hum) and mangled myths. Hermes had stolen Thor’s hammer and Set was having a bromance with Hastur and all kinds of things that made no sense.
The Viking ships bearing down on them did not help any.
The three pointed their empty weapons at the Vikings, squeezed the triggers, then flung their useless guns down to grab wooden batons or whatever steel was laying about. It was almost comical to watch the mindless men try to fight off their fate, yet the decent man in me bade me turn away. That’s when I saw the old man tuck something into his waistband under his jacket.
Before I could say something, Billy Haddock and his remaining men burst onto the deck from the forecastle’s quarterdeck. From somewhere inside they had picked up cutlasses and bucklers, for all the good it would do them. They swung at the mailed men boarding the galleon and hit, but the triple-mail of the attackers shed the cutlass strokes as water off a salmon’s skin. The longswords giving the return strokes had no such hindrance. Bucklers were bashed aside and steel met flesh in a battle only steel could win.
Billy Haddock survived the demise of his men in a typical coward’s move. He jettisoned his useless cutlass for his Bowie knife, and left the safety of his men’s bodies to take up a new shield- the old man.
The Vikings left his men bleeding hamburger on the deck and closed in about him. Their swords were dripping, but their eyes were cold and dispassionate- highly unlike one would expect of men who just chopped down enemies in battle! It was almost like they were bored. They ignored me as they moved to surround the old man.
Billy twitched. He knew something was not as it should. He expected the attackers to charge him, or to back away, but they did not. Verily, they looked amused as they came. That was when Billy realized he had made a mistake. He had taken the wrong hostage. An old man nearing the end of his life was not worth a lick of salt to these men. They could not sell him, as he was too old to earn a copper in the market. He was too old and weak to work the fields. They could not trade him, or use him, or do anything with him. As the monks at Lindisfarne learned, old men were often simply killed, while the younger were enslaved. Thus Billy Haddock threw the old man down and lunged for me.
The moment he placed his knife against my throat he knew he had erred again. The Vikings did indeed stop, but only to form a circle around us- and the old man. Billy looked with horrified eyes at the old man laying on the deck, who was swiftly raising a lustrous and gleaming flintlock pistol he had drawn from under his jacket. Not a second later that old man shot a three-quarter inch ball of lead cleanly through Billy Haddock’s head just above the right eye.
Haddock dropped to the deck, flat as a mackerel and as dead as his comrades.
I joined him a dew seconds later, though he was dead and I was not. The last thing I heard before that flintlock crashed against the back of my own head was, “Lo siento mucho, kid. I will make this up to you.”
It was strange laying there stunned, feeling my vision restrict to a tiny tunnel and my lights ebbing out. I could have sworn I saw the name of the ship above the stern poopdeck shift ever so slightly. The J was no J- it was a stylized T. And the P was no P, but a battle-damaged H, and somewhere in the middle my fading vision saw clearly a W.
Then all was black.
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“And did you ever see the old man again?” asked one lad. He was Gilbert, a grandson through my fourth son Giles. A bright boy, but not a very imaginative sort.
“I did see him again, once more,” I admitted. “It was on All Hallows Eve, almost a year later. There was a knock on the door of my shack, and the old man and two of his men came in.”
My family sat forward now. I had told the tale of Billy Haddock before, but never the return of the old man of the sea.
“I was still serving drinks at Gil’s, when I wasn’t answering questions of the Coast Guard, the Royal Navy, and the local police. I woke up on Billy’s cutter, now drifting aimlessly off the Cornish coast. Coast Guard helicopters spotted me, and the diving and salvage equipment on board, and they notified the Navy. Evidently the area where the boat was had seen a Royal Navy squadron run aground and go down a few hundred years ago. The place had since claimed other vessels, enough so that it was placed off-limits to all shipping and treated as a waterborne graveyard. I was trespassing, but since I knew nothing of navigation or sailing or diving or anything except how to mix a Tequila Sunrise, I was escorted to the local Bobbies, who noted I was on a boat that did not belong to me, but to the local gangster. Upshot was, Gilbert, was that I was rather easy to track down. The old man did not have to work hard at all to find me.
“He and two large, strong men entered my rundown shack. At a nod, the two reddish-blonde giants gave me three small sacks, each larger than the previous. Once they had done so, they mumbled something then left. The old man lifted the smallest sack.”
“For the harbormaster,” he said. I had never noticed his accent before, but now it was thick enough to cut butter. “He gave me a good berth, and kept his mouth shut about it afterward.”
He lifted the second sack. “For you, for your troubles and for that knock on the head.”
I accepted the sack with a nod. I put it away. Kenny Rogers had a song once- don’t count your money while sitting at the table. Good advice. So I never let my eyes leave the old man. Not even when he reached for that third sack.
It was the size of a good bottle of Scotch, but far too light. He tossed it to me. “Open it in forty years,” he said, “but not a day earlier. Remember Lyle Camara? He couldn’t wait.”
The wizened image of a dessicated skeleton covered in grey rags popped into mind. It was not the same as I saw then, but it was the same man. That bone-handled knife still jutted from his throat.
“When I looked up, the old man was gone.”
“What was in the sacks, grandfather!” asked Lucille, my eldest granddaughter.
“I know not what was in the packet for the harbormaster,” I replied easily and honestly. I had never looked. “At least not for sure. He retired shortly thereafter, and moved to the Welsh coast. I assume he had gotten roughly the same as myself- a dozen Spanish gold doubloons. With that I bought an education, this fine house, and invested enough to see you all born and gone to university yourselves.”
“Grandfather is too modest,” said Ethan, my oldest son. “Twas hard work and a lot of it that brought him from a barkeeper to a captain of industry. Now get on, children, it is time for bed.”
“Then there is no Old Man of the Sea, nor any Vikings?” asked Gilbert. I could swear I saw a tear forming in his eye.
“None at all.” said Malcolm, my middle boy. He was almost forty now, as hard a worker as ever I was but one who never had a head for fantasy or stories. He will be great businessman one day.
“What about the third sack?” asked Gilbert. “Forty years, the man said. Do you still have it?”
Ethan was shaking his head, and both Malcolm and his siblings were shaking their heads. But the look in young Gilbert’s eyes haunted me. I rose on legs grown white and spindly, and moved toward the bookcase, I removed Winston Churchill’s epic Crusade in Europe from its shelf- all volumes- and from the box revealed, drew forth a worn sack.
Malcolm and Ethan could have had heart attacks. They had never believed my tale, and even now, with proof before them, they were incredulous. I winked at them as only a father can and set the sack onto the table. The dust of forty year had seeped into the canvas of the sack, weakening it.
I raised my eyes to the heavens.
“For forty years I have kept this safe. Now, upon this eve, I do as I was asked and open this bag.”
“Why are you speaking to the ceiling, grandfather?”
I smiled. “I am calling out to the Old Man of the Sea, child, wherever he may be. I want him to know I was faithful to his wishes, and not to pay me any more visits.”
Gilbert nodded solemnly, then helped me- against his father’s wishes- to open the canvas bag. Inside was a bottle, as I had surmised, and it was empty, as I had thought. But not quite. Inside was a note. I removed the cork, and pulled forth a tiny scroll. Within were these words:
TWH Imhotep Award (Best Modder) - ParthianShot
TWH Augustine Monk Award (Most Helpful TWH Forumer - tech help/mod forum) – Terikel
TWH Good King Wenceslas Award (Favorite Moderator)- Awesome Eagle
TWH Best History Thread (TWH History only) – The Alternate History Thread by AE
TWH Egil Skallagrimson Award (Best War Story) – The Eagle and the Wolf XI: Return to Vetera" by Terikel Grayhair
TWH Snorri Sturlusson Award (Best AAR) A Crown for the Wolves by EoJ
RLT Sainthood Award (Nicest Forumer) – Awesome Eagle
RLT Leonardo DaVinci Award (Most Intelligent Forumer) - Pitt
RLT Court Jester Award (Funniest Forumer) – Scruffy and EnemyofJupitor (tie)
RLT Joan of Arc Award (Craziest Forumer) – Scruffy
RLT Wise Old Monk Award (Most Mature Forumer) - Pitt
RLT Alexander Award (Best Newbie )- DarthDovah101
RLT Methuselah Award (Best Oldie )- Terikel
RLT Claudius Award (Most Underrated Forumer )- Ischenous
RLT Cicero Award (Best Debater/Orator) – Pitt
RLT Drunken Uncle Award (Life & Soul of the Holy Roman Party Thread) - Scruffy
RLT Empty Barrel Award (Most missed RLT Forumer) – Damned Near Everybody
RLT Hasdrubal the Handsome Award (Sexiest Forumer) – Terikel (Viking Beards are In again)
RLT Cato the Elder Award (Most Predictable RLT Forumer) - Awesome Eagle
RLT Tryhard Award (Non-staff forumer who works hardest for the good of RLT)- Punic Hebil and Edorix (tie)
RLT Viking Berserker Award (Most Unpredictable RLT Forumer) - Kor and Jax (tie)
RLT Longshanks Award (Favourite Forumer Nickname)- Terikel: Greybeard
RLT Guild Award (Best Duo/Trio) – Punic & DU & AE
RLT Prince Philip Award (Best Quote)- "My magic screen is constantly bombarded with nubile young things eager to please these old eyes. This truly is a wonderful period in which to exist!" - Terikel Grayhair
RLT Armani Award (Best Thread Maker)- Awesome Eagle
RLT Best Speller Award (grammar included) – Pitt and EoJ (tie)
RLT Ser Woof Onerry Trofy (Worst Speller Award, grammar included) – Nobiddy (closely followed by Nobuddy)
RLT Best Thread- Holy Roman Party XVII: Our Guns are Bigger than Yours!
RLT Best Signature Award – Anyone with a Terikel quote in the sig
RLT Best Gravatar Award – Gaius Colinius
Favorite Wood-burning Stove EoJ
Most Outrageous Post-Imperial Hangover Scruffles
It was done, and so am I.
|||||||||||||||| A transplanted Viking, born a millennium too late. |||||||||||||||||
|||||||||||||||| Too many Awards to list in Signature, sorry lords...|||||||||||||||||
|||||||||||||||| Listed on my page for your convenience and envy.|||||||||||||||||
Somewhere over the EXCO Rainbow
Master Skald, Order of the Silver Quill, Guild of the Skalds
Champion of the Sepia Joust- Joust I, II, IV, VI, VII, VIII
Who am I, you wonder? Call me John. That works about as good as anything these days. John. Pierre. Ishmail. Hey you. I answer to all, and always have since I first poured weak drinks in Gil’s Dive. I was there when Billy Haddock and his Squid Squad put the screws to that old man. Billy was about as bad as they come- a real piece of work, and not the good kind. His Squid Squad- twelve of the meanest, nastiest critters ever to crawl out of a woman’s womb- were famous up and down the quays for their vicious tempers, razored knives, and their willingness to use them.
You see, Billy was worse than all his boys put together. An incredibly arrogant and foul-tempered man, he was one mean son of a bitch. And he has special talents as well, like he could smell gold. That was what kept him as the Alpha Male in that gang of thieves, and what led to his demise. He caught that lustrous scent on that old fisherman.
Now, it ain’t often a fisherman smells like gold. But it ain’t unheard of, either. More than one old salt pulled up a net of herring to find a chest or the bejeweled skeleton of some old pirate caught in the rig. Most of the time the treasure is just junk, the bones coral or other natural sea-bottom things, but there has been a time or two in the legends that a true treasure was hauled up out of the deep. Billy knew the stories, and Billy could smell gold. His nose twitched, and that sealed the fate of the old man. He and his boys grabbed him, threw him into the chair, plopped a stale beer in front of him, and commanded him to talk.
Of course the old man knew nothing. The harbormaster had directed him to a pier far from his usual one, and that meant he had to pass by Gil’s Dive to get home. That was what he did when rough hands grabbed him and thrust him into the chair. His white hair was wild from the salty spray of Mother Ocean, and his rheumy blue eyes yet wilder from the manhandling.
“I said talk, you wrinkled fart,” Billy Haddock said. “And you damned well know what I am talking about.”
The old man cringed. In his day he was broad of shoulder and packed with muscles earned by hauling up heavy nets filled with shrimp and herring- by hand. Now machines manned by men like Billy Haddock do the hard work, and the old man’s once proud muscles atrophied as his bones bent with the years. In his day he was a man to be reckoned with- but that day was long past.
“You best do as the man say,” whispered Lyle Camara, Billy’s Number Two. A dark little shit with a big knife and a ready smile, he was forever a toothy thorn in a decent man’s hide. “Billy knows you hiding something, cracker. You come clean, and maybe he lets you walk out of here with yo body intact.”
“Spill it, pruneface,” commanded Henk Jenkins, the other mouthy one of the crew. Like Lyle, he was a little shit with a big weapon. And like Billy, he was fish-belly white from a nocturnal life. But unlike Haddock who had a wild head of hair like a harpy, Henk’s scalp lay as bare as an eagle’s egg. And his choice of weapon was not a blade, but a pistol. He was often muttering about dumb shits who died bringing a knife to a gunfight. This was often said where Lyle could hear, which did nothing to ease the tension between them.
The old man glanced rapidly from leader to deputy to bad-ass then back again. Every time his eyes landed on a hoodlum, he cringed further and further away. But he eventually ran out of room in that squalid chair, and a rough hand slapped the back of his head to end the charade.
“Talk,” Billy ordered. “And don’t you dare try that ‘I don’t know anything’ routine. I know better.”
The old man straightened up. It looked as if he finally found his courage, but the thugs knew better. It was the act of a doomed man trying to find some dignity, nothing more.
“Talk,” Billy repeated, but softer.
The old man glared at him. “I know what you think you want. And I know what I know. Those two ain’t the same thing. Just so you know.”
“What is the old fart babbling about?” Lyle asked. His thumb ran over the edge of his knife as he spoke. A small red line formed.
Billy grinned cruelly as he ignored his lieutenant. “Is that so? Why don’t you just tell me what it is you do know,” he said, leaning closer to the old man, “and I’ll decide whether it is what I want to know or not.”
The old man spat onto the table. “Fine. I fished up a bell. A ship’s bell. When I saw what was carved on it, I threw it back, said all fifteen prayers I know as I winched in my other nets, and got the hell away from there.”
Lyle fingered his knife. This time the thin line was welling red. He smiled at the wound he did not feel. “And where was this bell at?”
The old man smiled gleefully. All five of his teeth were showing in the dim candlelight. I was shivering where I was standing- and that was in the corner farthest from that bunch.
“Where was the bell found?” he corrected, a grammar nazi to the end. “That is known only to the heavens, to myself, and to the ghosts who dwell in the wreck from whence it came. The way it ought to be.”
“He found the
“The JP was loaded with gold and silver ingots when she went down four hundred years ago,” Billy recalled. “Many have searched, but none have ever found her. It is said she went down in a terrible storm, blown clear across the ocean to these parts where she dropped into the deep.”
“I heard she was pillaged, and sunk by those pillaging her,” Lyle recalled. “Them Spanish got their shiny butts kicked by youse English fellows, who took the gold.”
“That gold never made it to any king or queen,” Billy reminded him. “English or Spanish. No privateer ever registered it, nor did any pirate ever spend so much as a single Spanish doubloon. No, the JP rests off these blighted shores, her crew fed the fishes long ago, and her gold lays within her rotting timbers, untouched by salt or sea. And this old man knows where she lies.”
“She survived the storm and the sea, but fell to Vikings,” the old man said. “The gold you seek went north into foreign lands, never to be seen by southerners again. Some of them Vikings went down with her, and guard what is left of her with their spirits. Only a fool would disturb them.”
Haddock laughed. He threw his head back and roared his laughter. I thought the roof would come down from the noise, but it did not. Then Haddock squinted a steely grey eye at the old man and brought his face real close. “Vikings died out a thousand years ago, you fool. The Spanish lost their gold four hundred years ago. Simple math says there weren’t no Vikings about when the JP went down.”
The old man smirked smugly. “So you say.”
Haddock slammed his fist down on the table. The old man jumped.
“Tell me where you found it!” he barked. “No more games, old man. My patience wears thin. Tell me now, and you will live. Otherwise I will let Lyle here gut you like a fish.”
“I can’t tell you,” the old man stammered. “My Loran-C never worked, and one bit of ocean looks pretty much like another.”
“Then you are going to die.”
The old man held up his hands in surrender. “I can’t tell you, but I can take you. I will never forget the feel of that place. I can find it again.”
“You had better,” Billy said. Then the bastard noticed me polishing glasses behind the counter, deep in the shadows of the bar. He had forgotten me, for which I was grateful. Now he jerked his head toward me and said to his goons, “I forgot about him. No witnesses.”
“Fishfood?”
Billy shook his head, for which I am eternally grateful. “Nah, he makes a good Tequila Sunrise. Bring him along. We can always feed the fishes with him later, or use him to demonstrate to the old man what happens when people mislead Billy Haddock.”
The bastards hauled us down to their boat and threw us on board. The old man was hustled to the pilot house, while I was cast below into the filthiest galley I had ever seen and ordered quite bluntly to “make some sammiches, bitch.” While I was feeding these buzzards, the boat moved and I knew we were leaving the harbor. Neither me nor that old man would ever see it again. I was sure of it, as sure as there was blood on the hands of Lyle Camara and Billy Haddock.
It puzzled me why Billy would take us out in his boat, and not use that of the old man. I mean, people wouldn’t say anything no matter what he did, so why use his own fuel?
I got my answer after the bastards ate their fill, and threw scraps to me to bring to the pilot house. One of them, a bruiser called Phil, escorted me to where Billy and the old man stood by the wheel. Carl, another bruiser, was assembling an old Sten gun. A loaded one already lay by his side. The sight scared me. Why do they need two Stens? Or three, I thought, as I noticed more parts in the bag. Anyway, Carl finished his assembly and left, being relieved by Phil. I was thrown into a corner and forgotten.
I awoke to a beautiful sight. Not as lovely as Billy Haddock hanging from a gibbet, but one more beautiful in an aesthetic sense. The skies had cleared, and ahead was a full moon. The running lights on haddock’s tub were out; there was nothing outside to mar the beauty of billions of stars joining the moon to reflect off of the still waters. It was lovely, if monochrome, and made me realize why so many men discard life ashore to work out here. It was breathtaking.
“I am sorry you got roped into this,” the old man whispered. He had evidently heard my gasp at the sight outside, though the two goons Billy left guarding us slept through it. Maybe it was the hum of the motors that lulled them asleep, or maybe the past-due mayonnaise I buttered their sandwiches with.
“Wrong place, wrong time,” I said with a shrug. It was not his fault we were going to die.
“What do you know of the
My face was a blank.
“You Cornish call it the Juanita Piñata,” the old man continued. “It exists in every culture, or at least English, Cornish, Irish, and French. I think maybe even the Norwegians have it as well. No matter the land, all have one thing in common. The ship’s name was two words, one beginning with J, the other with P.”
“I only know what Haddock said back at Gil’s,” I replied honestly. “A Spanish treasure ship that was blown off course from the Caribbean and sank somewhere over on our side of the ocean. One survivor made it to shore. He had gone mad, so nobody trusted his tale.”
“Close enough,” the old man grunted. “So you know why we are in Haddock’s boat, and not mine, eh?”
Suddenly it came to me. Haddock was a fisherman when he had to, a salvager when he could. The old man’s fishing boat could only haul up and cast nets, while the cutter Billy Haddock used carried diving equipment and winches. Haddock believed the old man found the wreck of the JP, and was going to bury them both in the hull he will empty once his boat was floating atop the site where she went down.
“You know what a piñata is, kid?” the old man asked. I knew it some kind of Spanish toy, but not what. He saw that, and enlightened me. “It is a decoration filled with goodies. A blindfolded kid smacks it with a stick to break it open. This wreck is aptly named.”
I gulped. Around us, a cold mist rose and grew thicker. A chill set in that tickled my very bones. I shivered, and the old man laughed.
“We are almost there. Stick close, kid, and obey my words if you want to see another dawn. Now kick the goons awake. We are almost there.”
Billy Haddock lurched into the pilot house with a pistol in his hand, ready for use. He glanced outside and saw naught but grey as the moonlit mist shrouded the vessel. He then glanced at his nav system- but that displayed a dizzying array of spinning numbers- never once pausing. An experienced sailor would note latitudes and longitudes ranging from the North Pole to the South Pole, and from Greenwich Mean to Peking China. Then he looked at the sonar display, which was an empty as a two-bit whore’s head. The Webley handgun rose toward the old man’s head.
The old man laughed, then pointed outside.
“We are where you wanted me to take you, Mr Haddock,” he said, “though I did warn you that it was not where you wanted to be.”
Billy began to squeeze his trigger when he abruptly stopped and tilted the revolver to the ceiling while easing the hammer down. I followed his gaze out into the thick fog, and my brain will never forget the sight I saw then. An ancient galleon, rigged in tatters, bulled through the mist to collide side-against-side with Haddock’s cutter.
“Don’t just stand there gawking, Haddock,” the old man wheezed. “Get a line on her before she drifts back into the fog and you lose her forever.”
Haddock and his men sprang to life. Ropes were pulled from lockers and bound quickly into loose nooses, then cast at the wooden ship. Enough of them caught onto objects to provide some help, and the old man had thrown the cutter into reverse just at the collision. Between the two, the ships merged into a single dark knot in the grey. There was a name barely visible on her bow. Most of the letters were faded into oblivion, but two stood out vividly in the midnight moonlight. JP.
Phil Shadd lifted his Sten gun and swung it to cover us. The thugs had the JP. We were now expendable. I felt my bladder bursting, but the old man smiled and winked to the Loran-C nav system. Haddock smacked the gun to the sky with a curse.
“You fool,” he shouted to his gunman. “Unless you were following his course closely, which I doubt you did in your sleep, that old man is the only one who knows where we are and how to get back. If you kill him now, I will personally throw you to the sharks.”
“I don’t like this, boss,” Shadd stammered. “The JP is a wreck- a sunken wreck. Yet here she be, bound to our boat. She’s a ghost ship, boss. Its bad mojo to mess with a ghost ship!”
“Evidently people believed it to be a sunken wreck,” Haddock explained as if to a child, “because that Spanish survivor said she went down. Maybe he abandoned her- he was crazy, after all, and she has been following wind and wave ever since?”
“For five hundred years?” Shadd shouted.
Haddock moved like lightning. I could see once again the prowess and strength that made him the leader of this gang of cold killers. He picked up Shadd bodily and threw him onto the other ship.
Shadd landed with a loud thunk, and jumped to his feet to find Haddock pointing the Webley at him.
“Are you wet or dry?” he asked sternly.
Shadd glanced down. He was on a deck covered in algae and moss, but a solid dry deck for that.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.
“Oh, you will be,” whispered the old man.
Haddock ordered his men to board the ancient galleon once it was firmly secured to his boat. To make sure the Spanish ship stayed tied up, he threw me and the old man onto the strange vessel as well. Maybe he knew we would untie the boat and make off into the night while he was away, or maybe he did not trust his own knots in tying us up. The one thing I did know, was that he could not simply kill us now to secure his treasure. The old man had made that plain to him with a wink to the Loran navigation that was still spinning crazily and another to the fuel gauge.
“We used a little over a third getting here,” he said casually, “and she was a third empty when we started out. I figure if one knows where we are now and where we are going, and can reckon without the aid of that compass which is spinning worse than the radio doo-hickey, one could just about make it to port. But if one is wrong… Well, a boat can stay afloat going in landless circles for a long long time. Just look at the JP.”
Then he smiled wickedly. “How much food do you have on this tub, Haddock? Better yet, how much fresh water? Have you ever seen a man thirst to death? A horrid thing. Horrid.”
“Shut up,” Haddock ordered, but the point was made. The old man had led them to the treasure ship, but had done so in such a way that they were now dependent on him to get them back. All the gold in the world was as dust when the water supply was bone dry. Salt mist can create a powerful thirst. Already some of the lads were feeling a bit parched.
With a jerk of his head, Haddock ordered us onboard the wreck. The ship was dark as a whore’s heart, and the moon barely penetrated the shield of mist. I could make out the gunwales and a mast, but little else. I simply followed the noise of the thugs moving. Eventually we found a stairs leading up, to what some were already bawling was the forecastle, and a stairs up on the other side as well. Between the two was a doorway blacker than the rest. It is into this maw of the ship that Phil Shadd and Lyle Camara went.
The rest of us followed.
A lantern was found and ignited. Amazingly it still had fuel, and lit up a corridor leading back toward the aft, which would put us in the hold before we got that far, I hoped. I wanted this nightmare to end.
A door ahead opened. I shivered, thinking it swinging creepily open to devour us, yet by the light and shadows I realized it was only Shadd doing his best to be quiet. It creaked open to reveal a forest of shadows and tangled vines.
“The hold,” Haddock stated, unnecessarily. “Find the chests.”
He ought not to have said that.
No sooner did the words leave his lips than a glow in the ceiling was born, and grew. By the golden light spreading throughout the ceiling, we could see the shadows and vines resolve themselves into forms and ropes.
The forms were human. Some of them were clumped into groups, fine statues of people in conversation. Others sat along the wall as if patrons of a bar. At the edge of the light I could see a statue of a man with his arms raised. He had huge eyes, though the pupils were slitted like a serpent. And in the corner was a female statue, plainly garbed in a simple robe, reclining on a low couch.
The thugs raised their weapons at first sight, then lowered them as they realized they would be spraying lead into marble, a useless waste of valuable ammunition. Valuable, you say? Bullets cost little. To this I would agree, but value is relative. If you have only the bullets you have on your person and get into a firefight, each bullet becomes very valuable as without it your gun no longer goes bang and becomes but a hunk of iron. If you had a rucksack filled with bullets, you could shoot all day long. The thugs had no backpacks and only a few had thought to bring a spare magazine.
But I digress. Statues are no threat, despite the eerie and unexplained glow spreading across the ceiling. A light-emitting fungus maybe? The biologist in me was fascinated. From somewhere an electric crackle emerged- had an unseen storm arisen outside, causing static here? The strange hum accompanying it could be water along the hull, dampened by the wood through which the sound might travel. I was in awe at the spectacle and how it came to be, but the old man was not. He must have seen this before, because he suddenly grabbed me and threw me to the floor.
“Cover your eyes and do not move,” he whispered.
I felt him on the floor beside me. None of the thugs had noticed, or if they did, they did not care. Their eyes were wide with the view, their fingers white on their weapons, only their trigger fingers along the trigger guards not tight with anxiety.
The crackle I heard earlier rose to a hectic pitch. The glow had reached all walls now, and the hum rose in volume to a soothing tune. I heard movement- and not that of the crew. I dared peek. The statues were moving, dancing to the relaxing strains of the melody surrounding us. Then the serpent-eyed statue by the far wall turned toward us and cried “Everyone attack!”
The statues rose and spun from their stations to charge the thugs en masse. Sten guns chattered and spat lead, pistols barked, and some of the assailants broke apart into debris. But the rest charged in. I heard the biting ring of metal striking stone and knew those without guns were fighting for their lives and losing. Bodies thudded all around, but I kept my head down and my eyes covered and quaked with fear there on the floor until no more sounds were made anywhere. It seemed to last an eternity.
The old man shook my shoulder. “Get up, kid,” he said. “Its over. We need to get hat and get gone.”
I released my head from the deathgrip in which I had held it and rose onto quaking feet. “What the hell was that?” I asked. A quick glance around me revealed the glow retreating, the statues where they were, though some were damaged, and six of Haddock’s crew were lifeless on the ground. Haddock was not among them.
The old man shook his head in wonder. “You did not recognize the situation, kid? You being young and all?”
I shook my head.
“The air was electric, so frightfully hectic,” he said. “And the music was soothing, and they all starting grooving.”
I was speechless, and completely clueless.
“The Man in the Back raised his hands to the sky, and had eyes as big as the sun, and the girl in the corner wanted no-one to ignore her because she thinks she is the passionate one. Then the man in the back screamed Everyone Attack-”
“And they turned it into a Ballroom Blitz,” I finished. The old man was right- I did recognize this. It was a song, just coming into fashion among us kids. “But how?”
“Haddock thinks this is his treasure ship,” the old man replied as he dragged me through the now-still statues. At this distance, they appeared more lifelike and almost translucent; definitely not stone as I had thought. “But I told him it was not what he thought. He didn’t listen. That mist, these beings… We are not on the JP, kid. We are in the Baths.”
“There must be hundreds of these creatures here,” I said in awe.
“There were, or will be,” the old man said sternly. “That fellow over there, with the snake eyes, that is Adder. He was king of this place back in the day.”
“And the woman over in the corner?” I asked. Suddenly the beings were not as frightening as they once were.
“Glory of Sparta,” he said. “She took over after Adder vanished. She was the one who warned me what Adder was planning. She vanished mysteriously just before the Banstick Kid came in.”
“Awesome,” I said.
“He comes later,” the old man spat. “We have to move now.”
We exited the baths, or the hold, or whatever that place was. A new room filled with smoke and shadows greeted me, but by now I had picked up on the old man’s signals. When he was relaxed and moved briskly, there was no danger. If he stiffened and moved like he needed a cane, then there was something to watch out for. Here he moved with feline ease.
“A Tavern?” I asked, examining the shadows. I saw what looked like shadowy human-like forms gathered around listening to an old minstrel of sorts telling a MidWinter’s Tale.
The old man nodded. “The Red Lion Tavern. Usually more active than this, but hey, they will keep the thugs in line. Two very powerful beings frequent this place and rule it with an iron hand, and a third is rumored to pop by from time to time as well. We should be safe enough here for the moment.”
We were, and only for a moment. Three of Haddock’s thugs blundered into the Tavern with eyes wide with fright and empty pistols in their hands, screaming hideously about a Dotkor and what not. The denizens sprang to life but dashed aside, and I soon saw to what the old man referred. The trouble-makers were smashed into a protoplasmic jelly with a gigantic mighty hammer that simply materialized in the air and fell upon them without warning.
“Bless EoJ,” the old man whispered. “Always on the ball.”
On the other side of the tavern was a door leading to the hold. The enclosed space with a hatch above could be nothing else. I started forward, but a wrinkled hand held me back. I was directed to look down- and saw there was no floor between us and the ladder leading to the hatch. There was no floor below that either. In fact, the hole seemed to go beyond the ship and into the depths of hell.
“Scruffles,” the old man whispered. “He never did finish it. Go around.”
I followed his hand, and saw that the floor circled about the bottomless hole and led to a small moonlit alcove beneath the ladder. There were three chests there. One was propped open, displaying an open sack of doubloons and some ingots beside it. I reached impulsively for a handful, but stopped when I saw the pirate laying beside it. Lyle Camara, with his own knife deep in his throat and his dead eyes horrifyingly wide open.
“Cursed gold,” the old man said. “Touch nothing here.”
I crossed myself. It seemed more apt than pissing myself, which was what I really wanted to do. Somehow the ancient ritual brought me peace and solace.
The old man pointed to the ladder leading to the hatch above. I understood- that was our exit. I climbed, and the old man followed.
I threw the hatch open and climbed out into the daylight. The wreck caught my eye and held it- she was as new! All the algae and moss was gone. A nudge from below caused me to stop my gawking at the shining teak decks and spotless oak masts and move aside to let the old man out. The old man had been hanging impatiently on the ladder below in the dark hold while I took in the massive change. I helped him out, and we both moved to the gleaming gunwales where a green and rolling landscape was flitting by.
I glanced to the opposite gunwale. There too the fog and mist was gone, replaced by rolling hills moving past. We were no longer on the open sea, but upon a fast-moving river. A canoe with three men zipped past.
"The River of Time," said the old man. He added with a cruel grin, "don't fall in here."
I shivered, suddenly chilled to my core. If we were on a river, a port was nearby. Haddock would no longer need us. We were expendable.
“Don’t you worry none about him,” the old man said, resting his forearms on the gunwales as he leaned forward to take in the view. He nodded toward an approaching vessel and its sister ship. “He is going to be too busy with those lads over there.”
I followed his gaze. My jaw could have hit the floor. Bearing down on our suddenly pristine galleon was a pair of oared dragonships, filled with armed and armored men from days long gone by waving swords and axes. The words of the old man in the tavern returned- this ship had been sacked by Vikings. It had been so before, and would be so again, now, in 1974.
The old man laughed cruelly. “Billy Haddock used up all his bullets on the spirits below, did he not? Oh lad, this is going to be interesting.”
Tommy Fisher, Benny Narwhal, and Stevie Minnows ran onto the deck from somewhere aft. Like the fellows in the Tavern, they were wild of eye and oblivious to the serenity passing by. They were terrified beyond their wit’s end, a fitting party of patients to keep a team of psychiatrists and psychologists busy for decades. Their blabbering about the Dotkor was replaced by living statues (ho-hum) and mangled myths. Hermes had stolen Thor’s hammer and Set was having a bromance with Hastur and all kinds of things that made no sense.
The Viking ships bearing down on them did not help any.
The three pointed their empty weapons at the Vikings, squeezed the triggers, then flung their useless guns down to grab wooden batons or whatever steel was laying about. It was almost comical to watch the mindless men try to fight off their fate, yet the decent man in me bade me turn away. That’s when I saw the old man tuck something into his waistband under his jacket.
Before I could say something, Billy Haddock and his remaining men burst onto the deck from the forecastle’s quarterdeck. From somewhere inside they had picked up cutlasses and bucklers, for all the good it would do them. They swung at the mailed men boarding the galleon and hit, but the triple-mail of the attackers shed the cutlass strokes as water off a salmon’s skin. The longswords giving the return strokes had no such hindrance. Bucklers were bashed aside and steel met flesh in a battle only steel could win.
Billy Haddock survived the demise of his men in a typical coward’s move. He jettisoned his useless cutlass for his Bowie knife, and left the safety of his men’s bodies to take up a new shield- the old man.
The Vikings left his men bleeding hamburger on the deck and closed in about him. Their swords were dripping, but their eyes were cold and dispassionate- highly unlike one would expect of men who just chopped down enemies in battle! It was almost like they were bored. They ignored me as they moved to surround the old man.
Billy twitched. He knew something was not as it should. He expected the attackers to charge him, or to back away, but they did not. Verily, they looked amused as they came. That was when Billy realized he had made a mistake. He had taken the wrong hostage. An old man nearing the end of his life was not worth a lick of salt to these men. They could not sell him, as he was too old to earn a copper in the market. He was too old and weak to work the fields. They could not trade him, or use him, or do anything with him. As the monks at Lindisfarne learned, old men were often simply killed, while the younger were enslaved. Thus Billy Haddock threw the old man down and lunged for me.
The moment he placed his knife against my throat he knew he had erred again. The Vikings did indeed stop, but only to form a circle around us- and the old man. Billy looked with horrified eyes at the old man laying on the deck, who was swiftly raising a lustrous and gleaming flintlock pistol he had drawn from under his jacket. Not a second later that old man shot a three-quarter inch ball of lead cleanly through Billy Haddock’s head just above the right eye.
Haddock dropped to the deck, flat as a mackerel and as dead as his comrades.
I joined him a dew seconds later, though he was dead and I was not. The last thing I heard before that flintlock crashed against the back of my own head was, “
It was strange laying there stunned, feeling my vision restrict to a tiny tunnel and my lights ebbing out. I could have sworn I saw the name of the ship above the stern poopdeck shift ever so slightly. The J was no J- it was a stylized T. And the P was no P, but a battle-damaged H, and somewhere in the middle my fading vision saw clearly a W.
Then all was black.
“And did you ever see the old man again?” asked one lad. He was Gilbert, a grandson through my fourth son Giles. A bright boy, but not a very imaginative sort.
“I did see him again, once more,” I admitted. “It was on All Hallows Eve, almost a year later. There was a knock on the door of my shack, and the old man and two of his men came in.”
My family sat forward now. I had told the tale of Billy Haddock before, but never the return of the old man of the sea.
“I was still serving drinks at Gil’s, when I wasn’t answering questions of the Coast Guard, the Royal Navy, and the local police. I woke up on Billy’s cutter, now drifting aimlessly off the Cornish coast. Coast Guard helicopters spotted me, and the diving and salvage equipment on board, and they notified the Navy. Evidently the area where the boat was had seen a Royal Navy squadron run aground and go down a few hundred years ago. The place had since claimed other vessels, enough so that it was placed off-limits to all shipping and treated as a waterborne graveyard. I was trespassing, but since I knew nothing of navigation or sailing or diving or anything except how to mix a Tequila Sunrise, I was escorted to the local Bobbies, who noted I was on a boat that did not belong to me, but to the local gangster. Upshot was, Gilbert, was that I was rather easy to track down. The old man did not have to work hard at all to find me.
“He and two large, strong men entered my rundown shack. At a nod, the two reddish-blonde giants gave me three small sacks, each larger than the previous. Once they had done so, they mumbled something then left. The old man lifted the smallest sack.”
“For the harbormaster,” he said. I had never noticed his accent before, but now it was thick enough to cut butter. “He gave me a good berth, and kept his mouth shut about it afterward.”
He lifted the second sack. “For you, for your troubles and for that knock on the head.”
I accepted the sack with a nod. I put it away. Kenny Rogers had a song once- don’t count your money while sitting at the table. Good advice. So I never let my eyes leave the old man. Not even when he reached for that third sack.
It was the size of a good bottle of Scotch, but far too light. He tossed it to me. “Open it in forty years,” he said, “but not a day earlier. Remember Lyle Camara? He couldn’t wait.”
The wizened image of a dessicated skeleton covered in grey rags popped into mind. It was not the same as I saw then, but it was the same man. That bone-handled knife still jutted from his throat.
“When I looked up, the old man was gone.”
“What was in the sacks, grandfather!” asked Lucille, my eldest granddaughter.
“I know not what was in the packet for the harbormaster,” I replied easily and honestly. I had never looked. “At least not for sure. He retired shortly thereafter, and moved to the Welsh coast. I assume he had gotten roughly the same as myself- a dozen Spanish gold doubloons. With that I bought an education, this fine house, and invested enough to see you all born and gone to university yourselves.”
“Grandfather is too modest,” said Ethan, my oldest son. “Twas hard work and a lot of it that brought him from a barkeeper to a captain of industry. Now get on, children, it is time for bed.”
“Then there is no Old Man of the Sea, nor any Vikings?” asked Gilbert. I could swear I saw a tear forming in his eye.
“None at all.” said Malcolm, my middle boy. He was almost forty now, as hard a worker as ever I was but one who never had a head for fantasy or stories. He will be great businessman one day.
“What about the third sack?” asked Gilbert. “Forty years, the man said. Do you still have it?”
Ethan was shaking his head, and both Malcolm and his siblings were shaking their heads. But the look in young Gilbert’s eyes haunted me. I rose on legs grown white and spindly, and moved toward the bookcase, I removed Winston Churchill’s epic Crusade in Europe from its shelf- all volumes- and from the box revealed, drew forth a worn sack.
Malcolm and Ethan could have had heart attacks. They had never believed my tale, and even now, with proof before them, they were incredulous. I winked at them as only a father can and set the sack onto the table. The dust of forty year had seeped into the canvas of the sack, weakening it.
I raised my eyes to the heavens.
“For forty years I have kept this safe. Now, upon this eve, I do as I was asked and open this bag.”
“Why are you speaking to the ceiling, grandfather?”
I smiled. “I am calling out to the Old Man of the Sea, child, wherever he may be. I want him to know I was faithful to his wishes, and not to pay me any more visits.”
Gilbert nodded solemnly, then helped me- against his father’s wishes- to open the canvas bag. Inside was a bottle, as I had surmised, and it was empty, as I had thought. But not quite. Inside was a note. I removed the cork, and pulled forth a tiny scroll. Within were these words:
Community Awards:
Red Lion Tavern Awards
It was done, and so am I.
|||||||||||||||| A transplanted Viking, born a millennium too late. |||||||||||||||||
|||||||||||||||| Too many Awards to list in Signature, sorry lords...|||||||||||||||||
|||||||||||||||| Listed on my page for your convenience and envy.|||||||||||||||||
Somewhere over the EXCO Rainbow
Master Skald, Order of the Silver Quill, Guild of the Skalds
Champion of the Sepia Joust- Joust I, II, IV, VI, VII, VIII