Page 50 | Chapter 2 | The Ghost Ship | A Free Serialized Online Novel by Scott Telek

Within the hour, they had instructed their driver on where to deliver the crates, trunks, and bags that made up their stowage. These packages contained the rich gifts sent from Iris’s wealthy family in England, in part to make up for the dearth of gifts from John’s father. John’s mother had drowned herself years before, and he had spent the bulk of life alone under his father’s steely gaze. Adding further distance to John’s now-broken relation to the man was the family silver he had appropriated for his wife and himself without the old man’s knowledge. John had convinced himself that because of his continuing relationship with Iris, a relationship his father had forbidden, as he had John’s relation to all women, he stood to inherit nothing of his father’s home and belongings. His father would change his will the moment he realized that John was gone, permanently gone. And so the silver. John had argued himself into believing that these were his right, his inheritance. That he should have something, regardless of his father’s intentions. Iris was not aware of this. There could be no doubt that the old man had, by then, discovered the disappearance. No matter; father and son would never meet again.

The couple’s things delivered to the wharf and taken aboard ship, they paid the driver and the carriage departed.

The couple spent a few uninterested minutes exploring the unfamiliar town, but in their hearts, each was eager to get onto the ship, away from Salem, with its strange inhabitants, and the lingering air of danger and supernaturalism that had characterized their morning. To be sure, what they expected to endure on ship loomed as less than pleasant in their minds, with the frightening, unpleasant captain, and his surly and aggressive first mate, but at least they would then be on their way toward their destination. They would be quiet, stay out of everyone’s way, John knew, and he suspected they wouldn’t have much of anything to worry about. He imagined the two of them telling the story of the strange voyage to their children, and projected, with a slight tightening of his stomach, the remembrance of these days in years ahead. He found it hard to picture, a small life, the end of excitement and travels, children at his feet, but he knew that those things must loom. He hoped she wasn’t already pregnant.