Page 72 | Chapter 4 | The Ghost Ship | A Free Serialized Online Novel by Scott Telek

Around them the energy and bustle of the deck gradually rose as their departure neared. Soon the men were casting lines and climbing aloft to loose the sails, hauling and fixing lines from the deck, calling to each other in their collection of musical shouts, voices rising and falling in rhythm, sounding, echoing, being answered, as they concentrated on the myriad tasks necessary to get the ship under weigh. The young couple looked aloft as a great white sail unfurled against the cloudy canvas of sky beyond. Fluttering, alive with the motion of the streaming breeze, it was trimmed by a man on deck, then bellied out, pregnant with wind. Around them, the ship let out a low rising creak, answered and aided by the voices of a thousand other complaints and groans which now arose from every quarter, and John felt her shift her balance in the water, saw the swags of line tighten to straining, as her timbers came gradually to life.

Soon the ship began to turn her stern toward the wharf, her beak toward the open water. John watched the distantly moving trees pass behind the bold planes of colorless sails, as though the whole earth had begun slowly to spin around them. The young couple stood beside each other at the starboard rail, watching as the land drained away. The few people on the pier, watching the departing ship, raised arms to wave. John looked after them.

“Wave, darling,” Iris said, nudging him lightly. Her own arm was flung high above her head.

John looked down at the small crowd. “I don’t know any of these people.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she replied, smiling broadly. He looked at her, and she gazed back, her eyes bright with laughter and happiness. He smiled too, but in his heart he shrank from her. She was always so aggressively happy, so relentlessly cheerful, he was at a loss to know how the perilous depths of his black melancholy, his recurring and fervent desire for solitude, could be reconciled with her violently extroverted nature.

Stepping away from her, averting his eyes, he let his gaze wander up the length of the mast. High up in the upper trees of the mizzen, he saw a black spot against the gray sky. It shivered, then turned, and he saw the protruding shape of beak. A raven. He recalled the comment made about ravens as ill omens, and, with a slight shiver passing down his neck, turned his glance toward the retreating town.