Where the Dead Wait by Ally Wilkes

Author:Ally Wilkes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Published: 2023-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Day returned to his Dutchman alone.

She shouldn’t be intact. She shouldn’t be here.

Reckoning: the punishment of past misdeeds.

Day wondered whether she would even take his weight. Whether the whole ghost ship would disappear under his hands and feet, casting him off like a piece of jetsam. But she looked exactly as he’d left her, and as he climbed over the side, he was met by a sense of presence. The same presence he’d felt in the séance: something hanging over him, as she’d hung over his entire life.

He was unable to escape it.

“Hello, old girl,” he said quietly.

Her deck was a dark maze of oiled canvas, yawning caverns formed by drifted snow, and Day knew that darkness well. It might have been any one of a hundred ice watches, with Day counting down the chill hours, hands clenched into his armpits, until he could report to Talbot in the Great Cabin below. The captain would be sitting in his oversized chair, wig jammed firmly onto the crown of his head, a well-thumbed Bible by his right hand. Rubbing his eyes, because he’d spent too long staring out the stern windows, until they’d become an endless mirror. “Ah,” he’d say, knowing him by his hesitant footsteps: Talbot had known him, and that was hard. “William Day. I hope you’re keeping good company.”

Swallowing down a muffled, agonized sound, Day fumbled for a light. Under the canvas, the deck shimmered into existence, rimmed with icicles sharp and fat as the teeth of a killer whale. The frosted brass reflected his lantern back at him, and he was suddenly aware of the loudness of his own breathing.

In a pool of darkness as profound and still as deep water, he could see the mouth of the mainmast hatch. It stood open, inviting.

Come home.

He’d shut it. Day racked his memories. Of course he’d shut it: he’d been the last man out, had checked the belowdecks, echoing and bare; had given the order to batten down the hatchway, desperately schooling himself not to look back.

Now it was open again.

He took a step and slipped, going to hands and knees. His heart thumping, he looked around desperately, as if the sound would wake the sleeping ship; pulled himself up by the goose-neck structure of the empty davits, their whaleboats now rotting into the landscape of Cape Verdant.

At the bottom of the hatch was a perfectly square patch of snowdrift, and Day stared at it, a cold, hard pit of uneasiness in his stomach. There was an indent to one side—about the size of a boot. The horrible suggestion of someone disappearing into the bowels of the ship. Someone who could still be there now.

The darkness below seemed to flicker.

He thought of someone down there, waiting just out of sight, waiting to step forwards—

“No.”

Everything seemed to press in on him. Clouded illuminators stared up from belowdecks like a line of eyes put out.

At the stern, the ship’s wheel was frozen in place. Day kicked cautiously at its base.

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