The Sailor and the Spectre

Day Three

The sun rose upon a joyful sailor, drifting peacefully across the vast sea. The coast of his homeland would soon be within view, though, at the moment, nothing but cool clear water surrounded him. Descending into the small cabin beneath, Nikolai searched about for his emergency flare pistol; he decided to arrive in style with a red flare popped into the cloudless sky. Tucking the gun into his pocket, he gazed around the compartment; no sign remained of the disarray of the previous day, for his ship was, once again, his own.

He began to ascend the few wooden steps to the controls, when a thought suddenly hit him. Somewhere, deep within him, he felt a strange familiarity about the events of the previous nights. Thinking long and hard— still resting between the two levels— he began to remember something. Though at first the memory appeared within his mind faintly and dimly as dusk's light, it began to dawn inside him like the rising sun. A story told to him in his youth would hold the key to his fate.

Something seemed so familiar, so eerily familiar, a kind of déjà vu set in, causing a shiver to run up his spine. A man trapped at sea, he thought, harried in the night by ghosts of the sea, ship hijacked, captain slain... no survivors.

The ship shook to a halt, causing him to stumble into the wall from the force. A sickening oozing sound accompanied the change; the air became rancid with a stench like a thousand butchered wales. He raced above deck, ignoring a bruised knee, to see what the matter was. Before him appeared a threat which chilled him to the bone. Algae green tendrils were wrapped over the ship's hull— "chaining" his vessel to the ocean's whims. They oozed a sickly green slime, hissing like an angry tom cat, and gurgling like a cauldron.

Stepping back in disbelief, he knew that he no longer existed in the world of reality, but had passed into the tale from his youth— a story which had haunted his boyhood nightmares. Not ready to give into his madness, he procured a fire ax and approached the growth about the vessel's breadth. There it lay, a thick, slimy cord binding his craft in its place, surrounded by the ever-rolling sea.

Lifting the hefty ax in both hands, he sent it crashing down, blade first, upon the oozing tendril. The growth showed signs of distress under the powerful blow, but the ax only left a slight notch where it had come down upon; slime, bursting from within, splattered his shirt and pants. Ambition overtaking him, he sent blow after blow into the massive tendril, cracking and splintering the outer skin' after nearly a dozen attacks. For the day's majority, he stood in the blistering heat attempting to free his vessel from its captivity.

The sun began to descend in the sky, colorfully illuminating the wispy clouds above in misty shades of rosy pink and radiant orange, but it also set upon a weary man— near weeping— who lay trapped upon the open sea, soon to be visited by darkness... and the things which follow thereupon.