Flight From the Dutchman

Captain Johanna Marrow of the Storm’s Eye seeks vengeance for her lover, the captain of the Flying Dutchman, when he is murdered and his ship is sunk over a cursed cargo of seal pelts. The Storm’s Eye must evade the ghost of the Flying Dutchman as they flee to the North, seeking a mysterious herd of murderous creatures so they may avenge the ghost ship and break its curse.

Captain Johanna Marrow had blood on her knuckles as the crew pulled at the oars, propelling the skiff across the black waters of the bay. Anchoring so near the trading port had been necessary and had yielded its intended quarry. Yet it still curdled the Captain’s blood to see the distant silhouette of the Storm’s Eye as it loomed slowly larger against the dusky sky. The sun dipped low, and her guts twisted.

“Put your backs into it!” Shelby grunted. At the quartermaster’s word, the crew’s efforts redoubled and there was a burst of speed for the next several strokes. None needed to be told twice. Fear of what would come with the darkness was incentive enough.

After nine weeks at sea, the Storm’s End was further North than its crew had ever ventured. An entire ocean lay between them and their common berths. 

And over the whole of that great distance, they had not been alone.

~

“This longing is a storm in my chest. It pulls harder than the tide, and all within me is slave to its current. You are my salvation, love. Without you, I am lost.” –Jack

Beneath the signature, a reply was scrawled by an unsteady hand. “My love, I could not save you this time.”

~

Nine weeks prior.

A ship had been spotted on the horizon in the early afternoon. The Storm’s End was anchored in an island cove Southeast of New Providence Island to resupply with fresh water. As the other vessel approached, it raised the black, and the Flying Dutchman was recognized. The mood of the crew lifted at the sight of the vessel. It was no surprise when the skiff sent ahead under a white flag was welcomed by Captain Marrow. Within the hour, the two vessels were anchored together, the crews commingling on the beach while the captains parleyed on the Dutchman.

“Here.” Johanna pulled a parcel out of her jacket, a stack of folded parchment tied neatly with a string. “Thirty-seven letters. I wrote every day.”

Jack grinned. That smile—the dimple on the left side barely visible beneath his beard—would haunt her until the day she met Davy Jones. 

“You’re better about it than I am,” he admitted, tucking his hand into his own vest and pulling out a much smaller parcel. Jack’s nose wrinkled, and his gaze was sheepish. “I think I got up to thirteen.” 

Johanna sighed, tossing her stack of letters onto his desk and folding her arms across her front. Before she could work up a suitably disdainful retort, he had grasped her by the belt and pulled her closer, wrapping his arm around her hips and tucking her against him. The hand still holding his letters slipped beneath her jacket, inserting them neatly into an interior pocket.

“I’d wager mine are longer, though,” he breathed in her ear. Johanna scoffed, but Jack persisted. “Come now, love. Let me make it up to you. It’s not my scribbled sonnets you want anyway.”

“You’d better not have wasted parchment on poetry.” Johanna smiled as he kissed her and the two of them maneuvered toward his bed.

Hours later, a growl of thunder and the warm spray of a thrashing sea woke Johanna. Her dream had been a violent one and the edges of it seeped into her waking perception. The tangled sheets were dark as a midnight sea. When she raised her arm, the darkness followed, dripping in slow rivulets down her pale skin. Her focus slipped past her arm to the still form beside her and the gaping slash across its throat, the stain that spread across its chest and arms and pooled around the pillow.

A low, keening sound started somewhere in her chest, quickly building to an all-consuming wail. It might have swallowed her whole, had a shadow not moved in the corner of her eye. 

A man stood at the foot of the bed, holding a short flint blade in his fist. Not a sailor, her senses told her. Features too delicately sculpted, too lovely. Ethereal.

No, not a sailor at all. A stowaway.

Johanna threw her body out of the bed, her hand reaching for the hilt of her sword.  Sinking grief threatened to engulf her, but beneath it an inferno flickered into life. She decided to burn. 

By the time she had drawn her sword and turned, the cabin was empty, the door ajar. Johanna grasped her coat and pistol and raced after the wretch onto the deck, throwing her coat around her shoulders.

A few of the Dutchman’s crew were standing watch at various posts. Their heads turned as she emerged from Captain Bolton’s cabin, her sword glinting in the starlight. The killer was nowhere to be seen. 

“Stowaway!” she cried. “Below decks!” Captain Marrow did not wait to see if the Dutchman’s crew obeyed. There was only one place the rat could hide. Vengeance pulsed in her as erratically as her own heartbeat, calling for blood.

The rest of the crew was stirring, alerted by her shout as she thundered down the steps to the gun deck. Crewmen lurched up from swinging hammocks, pulling up their boots and fastening belts, shouting to one another as she hurried past them to the wide hatch that led to the cargo hold.

The hatch was open and a figure emerged from it, unnoticed in the tumult of the half-awakened crew. He held something silvery and spotted, its movement liquid soft in his hands as he ducked into one of the gun bays. 

“Stop!” Captain Marrow raised her pistol as the man crouched, stepping into the shimmering pelt and pulling it up over his body. The gun port opened and she fired. Someone grabbed her arm, and the shot crashed through the decking overhead, raining splinters and debris. When she looked again, the gun port was open and empty. The creature—whatever he had been—had escaped.

Captain Marrow tore free, seething as she faced the crewman who had stopped her. Before she could speak, a voice overhead shouted.

“Bolton is dead!” 

Again grief threatened to swallow her, but as she took in the sullen faces of the sailors around her, another awareness rose to match it. The Flying Dutchman’s crew all knew who had been with their captain. 

Captain Marrow moved just as the crew did, angling for the open gun port and lurching through just before the first of them reached her. There was a moment of free fall, and then her body smacked into the warm, salty swells between the Dutchman and the Storm’s Eye.

The Flying Dutchman’s deck was in chaos as Johanna swam for the Storm’s Eye. By the time she reached her ship and grasped the line cast down for her, the beach was also in an uproar. The crack of pistol fire could be heard, the sulfurous gasp of gunpowder in the air.

“Weigh anchor!” Captain Marrow shouted. “Hoist the sails!”

“What is it, Captain?” Shelby shouted from the gun deck of the Storm’s Eye as her crew hurried to obey. 

Dark clouds gathered overhead and the wind howled, an echo of her nightmare coming to life.

“Foul play aboard the Dutchman! Head for open water!”

The Flying Dutchman chased the Storm’s Eye from the cove and into a brewing tempest. The sea boiled, waves thrashing against both ships. Captain Marrow held tight to the helm, keeping her eyes on the pursuing ship as it rose and fell among the waves. At the crest of a swell, she seemed to see figures clinging to the sides of the Dutchman, crawling up from the waves and over onto the deck before the ship dipped out of sight again. When the Dutchman came into view again, the deck was bare—not a man left on board—and the ship began to list, its broadside beaten by the churning sea. 

When the storm at last abated, the Storm’s Eye had weathered it, but the Flying Dutchman was nowhere to be seen, presumed lost to Davy Jones.

A week later, as the Storm’s Eye approached port, an unexpected squall blew them off course. And there in the midst of the tempest, as if risen from the depths of the Locker itself, the ghostly figure of the Flying Dutchman appeared, without a soul to be seen on deck. 

~

“You’ll never believe our latest cargo, my love. We took a trading ship from the North carrying five score of seal furs, soft and thick. I’ll have a pretty new vest for you when we next meet.” –Jack

~

“The Dutchman!” The shout rang out from the Storm’s Eye, now no more than thirty fathoms away from the approaching skiff. The Captain’s eyes scanned the dark horizon. Thunderheads roiled into shape, and lightning forked in a menacing arc. Within the second of illumination, she caught sight of the dark shape of the Flying Dutchman in the near distance.

“Pull lads!” Shelby cried again, and the small craft lurched forward, closing the distance to the Storm’s Eye. As the sailors scurried aboard, the ship was already preparing for the coming storm.

“I have our heading, Mister Taylor!” the Captain shouted to her first mate. “Get the ship underway, then report to my cabin.”

“Aye, Captain!” Taylor replied, shouting orders. 

For much of their journey the tale had been the same. Whenever the Storm’s Eye put to port, the Flying Dutchman appeared, a brewing storm their only warning before the ghostly ship descended upon them. They’d kept ahead of it thus far, but there was little doubt the Storm’s Eye was being held accountable for the Dutchman’s sorry fate.

None aboard the Storm’s Eye knew the details of Captain Bolton’s murder, nor how the Flying Dutchman’s crew had been surrounded and slaughtered by a herd of the very same creatures as it pursued the Storm’s Eye into the gale. Few would believe it, and those who did would send Captain Marrow to the depths if they suspected it might appease the ghost ship’s thirst for revenge. Johanna Marrow alone knew the full truth, and how to settle her lover’s restless spirit.

~

“We’ve been too long at sea. That cargo I spoke of has the crew in a state—half of them dreaming of riches and the other determined to throw the whole lot overboard after one man claimed a herd of seals had been sighted circling the ship. I imagined how you would laugh at such nonsense.” –Jack

Johanna’s hand shook, blotting the ink on the page as she scribbled a reply. “I found them, my love. I’ll be sending them to you presently.” 

~

Captain Marrow folded the letter, slipping it back into the interior pocket of her long, weathered coat with the others. Then she leaned over her desk, the map spread out before her, and measured the latitude and longitude the captain of the whaling vessel at the last northern trading port had given her. He had been loath to reveal the ocean’s secrets, but he could not hide grim understanding from his face when she’d spoken of seal skins and shapeshifters.

She marked the intersection on her map, out in the open sea a few leagues off the northern coast, as he’d said. The point on the map was empty, but as Johanna stared at the fine lines she had drawn to mark the spot, she felt a familiar stirring in her chest that she hadn’t known in all the long weeks they had fled across the ocean.

The thrill of the hunt.

Selkie. An unfamiliar word, but not so different from any other creature of the depths who had sunk ships and sent entire crews to their deaths. Johanna had never sought monsters or been prey to superstition, but to avenge the Flying Dutchman and appease its curse, there was little she would not do. 

And for Jack…

The inferno that had sparked so many weeks ago in his cabin flared anew. Only now, the seal-folk would be the ones to burn.