The Ballads of The Skeleton Crew

The Ballad of The Skeleton Crew (1|2)

(№1.2)

Too strange to believe, too dangerous to explore, a tale, forgotten in a box in an attic long gone, a box of dusty oak wood purposely left to rot and disintegrate and people who told and retold the story a billion times now crumbled to dust and ashes, reunited with the soil and long-lost forgotten too.

The Ballad of the Skeleton Crew is one of those forgotten, deceased stories, once famed for filling with anguish both the listeners and tellers alike, as seated around a bonfire or pub just as, and macabre flanks of flames dancing across their pallid limbs and tanned skin any season alike, incarnated once again in all its gory glory and chilling thrill to be told and retold, swept over even the lands and villages they could not reach, like the most contagious ailment.

Even expert navigators and their captains, along with the passive folk of the countryside, eaten up and impressed far quicker with freaky fables of maritime theme – when passing especially the shores of young America in the 17'0s and enjoying the wild and untamed existences near the Atlantic, unmarked by European history of influence, tragedies and horrors often never connoted with the vast and eternal grounds of the place where all dreams would come true - marched along confident and fearless, until they came across the saga and myths of the Skeleton Crew, sailing the shores of even the most tricked landscape and the most precious beaches indifferent, upended in many mouths, shaped to sound even more gruesome for innocent travellers or immigrants and lessened for the children as bedtime stories to not unsettle their minuscule moods all in its entirety.

They'd have a good laugh about it, drinking a few whiskeys to maybe consider it a moment, fingers although trembling a little bit more than before to the attentive eye, perhaps from the whiskey or rum or beer, or really because shivers catapulted down their spines and they shortly might regret a little the decision made to come to America or wherever else they have come to listen to it in the first place, before again bursting into laughter and giggles only adults could produce when concerned with such serious matter of life and death, for they were far too close to their end then they all cared to admit and recognise.

Of course, no one believed it really. Only by living through it and surprisingly enclosing a survivor, against all odds, could one start to.

Merely from the second they explored it with their own eyes, felt the dread in their veins, boiled blood roaring and impulses begging to get away, feeling the horror sink in till it stirred action and deed, would they apprehend and consider their faults, commencing with prayers for mercy on last time, since they terribly sinned and figured their errors, although no message to any kind of god will aid you in that intricate position of yours.

No one knew where they came from, the members, the crew, nor who they actually were, but what they would take – or in that case give - was as crystal clear as sky and water are right before a raging, hungering, avaricious storm, much taking and bestowing what that Cursed Crew did upon them.

Death always was to follow immediately after their arrival.

It started out with a beautiful melody, out of this world, akin to the chanting of angels, a soft hum carried by the wind to the ears of any foolish, gullible villagers, asking, begging, screaming to be adored and noticed, almost manipulating them to walk towards the huge cliffs boarding and throwing themselves in the sea to drown, for their hearts vilified and revelled upon hearing this god-like, sweet, compelling, unutterably beautiful song, luring and chiming the night with subtle sounds stemming right from a tropical paradise itself. Flowers would bloom in the middle of the darkest, saturnine night, bewitched and drunken, enchanted, birds would wake to twitter and mutter, their chirping compared now cheap, childish, in comparison to the whole, musky, inebriating note the music of the strangest instrument would partake.