The Ship

e'd had a fair trip from the Indies, God sent winds blew us swiftly home to Spain. The whole crew was glad to be away from the dark, terror ridden forests of the islands and those terrible rites we had encountered there. Little did we know of the even worse fate that would await us in the middle of the Atlantic; which would send my whole crew, gibbering insanity's, to their deaths in the cold, blue deeps, where unseen monstrosities would devour them with bestial relish.

I am the captain of that sad vessel, and I must unburden myself to God before the creatures and demons, who serve a more infernal, deathless master than Lucifer himself, take me. A God in whom I am beginning to doubt so I will die alone with the realisation that there can be no salvation for my soul, just an eternity of wailing torment. I must hurry, I feel their tentacles grope toward me, their putrid breath wafting over them, the net of their evil, no not evil, for it is much deeper and worse than simple evil ...

The wind had died, I had retired to my cabin after taking the dogwatch. Those long shadow haunted watches in the depths of the night. The slow, calm creaking sent me drifting to sleep. I dreamt of nameless, octopoid corruption's reaching up from the depths to consume my ship. I awoke screaming, as its jaws crushed and tore at my ships stout timbers, to hear echoed in my ears the mortifying screams of the watch on deck.

O' why did man ever venture upon the dark oceans. An intruder among the kingdoms of those that dwell beneath the tempest swept surface. Down, deeper than man will ever reach, multiplying, waiting till they can pull the very land down into the depths with corruption and fiendish machinations.

I clambered up the stairs, to the main deck, dreading with every step what monstrosity I would behold on the deck. Its ghastly visage turned to me, without turning the rest of its body, sightless eyes which saw on a different plane leered at me. Globs of mucus dripped from its fangs, as the deformed tentacles, which took the place of hands reached towards me. I fled its diseased, fucund body, as my men had done, screaming in terror, to the poop deck. Here I saw my men jump overboard, into the waiting maws of the sordid monsters of the deep. The thing sloshed toward me and hardly paused as I discharged my flintlock into its grotesque torso. Oily jelly pumped from the hole caused by the steel ball, falling to the deck, where it lay steaming. My crucifix was contemptuously thrust from my nerveless hand and I fled the creature and my ship to join the nameless terrors of the deep.

It is watching me, as I flounder in the inky blackness, leaning over the gilded name of my perfidious vessel. Obscuring the 'Marie' with its bulk, just the 'Celeste' standing out, reflecting its hateful corpse at me.

A slimy thing brushes my leg and then gets a tighter grip and slowly starts to pull me down. The degenerate on board laughs, it laughs like the sound of a hundred cannons discharged, like the mourning wails of the Spanish women and like the crying of starving children. Just as I'm pulled under, to be consumed by those below, it utters in a tongue, more used to mutilated speech, in a slightly disjointed way as if there is no one left to find humour in its jest

"APRIL FOOL!..."