The Ghost Ship

"Come baaack...captaaain...", a whispered ghostly voice echoed somewhere in the distance. "Come baaaaack, captaaaain...", the whispered voice sounding closer and a bit clearer now.

The captain woke up with a start. "Was it a dream? Was it...a...dream...?" The captain woke up, terrified to death, covered in the same familiar sweat again, after the terrible nightmare he had been having for the past six months now. He was grabbing his chest and breathing frantically, grasping his shirt in an iron grip, in the hopes that his heart would slow down and let him breathe normally again.

His cursed nightmare never changed, nothing was ever left out, or forgotten. Terrible things rarely are. "Did I dream it?... Did I...dream it?..." And the funny thing was he couldn't even tell anymore. Did his dream actually happen in real life, or was it just a nightmare that refused to stop invading his sanity. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick...tock..., tick...tock... "I am waiting for you...", the same whispered ghostly voice echoed in his head.

Captain Conrad felt guilty, extremely guilty for the terrible death or disappearance of dozens of his men, he didn't really know which was true. Nothing he did brought him solace anymore because guilt didn't let him live the way he had before the events of the 28th of December, 6 months ago.

He slowly started analysing his life: Captain Conrad was an excellent captain, not according to him, but to those who gave him credit for all his qualities and achievements throughout his career. He was a man who went on many a voyage and, as far as his crew was concerned, he had a good eye for picking out the best of the best to assist him on the high seas, facing even the most frightful weather conditions without fear. He trusted his men implicitly and the men trusted their captain, he wanted the best for them, of course, and so did they. They would have helped each other out, day or night, no matter what lay ahead of them. Such was the captain and such was his crew.

Then he started to remember...

On a chilly sunny morning, he had set sail for a trip they had to make to assist another ship that was experiencing some cargo issues, amongst other things.

The sun was high in the sky and they all looked fetching with their sunglasses on. After half an hour of sailing, one of the crew members noticed something in the distance, something akin to fog, but very very white and sparkly, almost like freshly laid snow. At first they thought it must be some sort of chemical accident which caused a strange reaction when it came in contact with the sea water and thought nothing of it when the fog started coming towards them faster and faster. After a while, the fog had completely surrounded them and no one was able to see anything else, except each other. However, the captain and the crew started to have an eerie feeling because the fog had completely changed colour and it had become a gloomy dark grey, like an omen of sorts.

And then they saw it! A large ghost ship, made entirely of gigantic white bones, like those of a whale, sailing on the ocean, all alone, without any crew on board. Sinister, indeed. The men saw that some of the bones were oddly shaped like numbers. The captain thought that perhaps every time someone saw the ship, that person couldn't help but think about what the numbers could possibly mean.

Neither him nor his crew heard any sounds coming from the ship and its structure never creaked no matter how big the waves got. It was like there was nothing on the water. Creepy...

However, unbeknownst to whoever stood before the ship, those numbers always changed at a certain time after their encounter with the ghost ship. If the ship had a name, the captain couldn't see it, but he did see a collection of bones which indicated the year it first set sail. It read 1887. "138 years ago...", the captain thought. There were 38 crew members on his ship, The Mauritania, except for himself. When the crew from The Mauritania first looked at the numbers on the ghost ship, they read 5628.

   As the captain was looking curiously at the numbers of the ship, he thought he saw a tall black figure out of the corner of his eye, standing on the far left of the ship. As he turned to have a better look, he realised there was nothing there. "I must be imagining things..." The same thing happened several more times and when he asked the crew if they had seen anything, no one actually did.

The captain consulted himself with his men and they decided to send 5 volunteers on the ghost ship to see if there was anyone aboard and if they needed assistance of any kind. They all agreed that if they didn't return in 15 minutes, the captain would send another 5 armed men to see what was going on. The men left.

15 minutes had passed and not a single peep could be heard coming from the eerie ghost ship. The remaining crew on The Mauritania started calling out to them, but there was no answer. So the captain decided to send the other 5 armed volunteers to see what was happening up there.

The captain was growing restless as he feared the worst, being concerned about the fact that no one saw the dark figure that he kept seeing out of the corner of his eye.

And then it happened!

"Captain, I'm stuck! I'm stuck in the hull of the ship! My arm went through the iron and came out the other side and I can't move anymore! Captaaain! Can anyone hear me?! Anyone?! Captaaaaaain!!!"

"Who is that? Smitty?", asked the Captain?

"What?", the others asked.

"Didn't you hear those screams?", the captain asked his crew.

"No, we didn't hear anything."

He thought he was perhaps losing his mind, hearing things that weren't there.

"Captaaaain, there's a ghost here! Can you see it, too?", another crew member on the ghost ship cried.

"My dead father is chasing me on the deck and I can't stop him. Someone help meeeee!", the captain heard another man on the ghost ship yell in agony.

"Stay away from me, you ugly clown! Stay awaaaaaay! Oh, Gooood, nooooo!", another man screamed on the ship.

"Get this stupid dog off me! Get off, damn you! Heeelp! Someone heeeelp! No, no, no! NOOOO!!!", a poor soul was heard yelling.

"Oh, God, it's so tight in here! The walls are closing in on me. I can't breathe! I can't breaaaaathe! Get me out of heeeeere!"

   No one but the captain was able to hear his men scream on that bloody ghost ship and he didn't understand what was happening to him, or to them. What terrible sounds those were... And the captain couldn't do a bloody thing to help, except look at that ship in horror, while his hands were ripping the hair from his head.

"I can't help them! I can't help theeeeem! Oh, God, I can't help them...", he thought in despair.

"May God have mercy on their souls, 'cause I can't help them..."

"Captain, what's going on?", one of his men asked.

"Can't you hear them? They're screaming, they're in trouble up there!", the captain yelled.

"Who?"

"The men I sent there!"

"We can't hear anything. Are you sure?"

"They're screaming! All of them, damn it!"

The crew looked at the captain intently and after a while they all decided to go and see if what he said was true. The captain wanted to come as well, but they said they needed someone to stay behind in case things got really bad.

"The captain always goes down with his ship, you know that."

   He was reluctant to stay, it all felt so wrong, so devilishly twisted. Despite his darkest fears, the remaining men went on the cursed ghost ship.

"Why did we stop ?", the captain kept thinking. "There was no distress signal, nothing to indicate a reason for us to do so. Why did we have to stop and investigate this cursed ship?" And the captain thought he felt the ship slowly grin, a terrible grin, a horrible grin... So much evil, so much darkness and then he thought of the only solution he had left.

He ran towards the box he thought could be the solution to saving his crew. He took out the flare gun and fired it straight up. He waited, grew impatient and fired another shell case. He started crying in desperation when he suddenly heard it. The sound of a helicopter in the distance. He thought he was imagining things. A helicopter pierced the dense fog and touched ground on the ship's landing pad. The poor captain was beyond relieved and his heart finally settled after a long battle with himself. The pilot got off the helicopter and asked the Captain if everything was all right, as he had seen the distress signal. Captain Conrad told him that his crew was in trouble and asked the pilot if he thought he could go with him on the other ship to find out what had happened to his men.

"What other ship? There's only you here."

The next thing the captain knew was that he was being woken up by a nurse's voice in a white hospital bed, surrounded by warm sunlight and the smell of freshly cut flowers.

He felt like he was trying to remember something but couldn't quite grasp it.

And then his face contorted into something that expressed fear and pain and sudden realization. He had a flashback from his ship. Before he was taken by the helicopter's crew, he looked at the ghost ship again and saw that it had slowly begun to resume its terrifying  silent voyage, but something had changed. Suddenly, the numbers on the hull showed 5666.

The last thing the captain saw when he looked at the ghost ship for the last time made him freeze where he stood. The black entity was standing on the upper deck facing him. It looked like a tall man that was made of black smoke and it didn't have any facial features that the captain could discern, but he felt that it was purposely looking at him, in an intense manner, analyzing him, waiting for something, like it didn't obtain what it had originally expected to.

"What in the world are you?", he thought.

Captain Conrad can't dream ordinary dreams anymore. The captain has decided to go after the ghost ship.