Tales of the Haunted Titanic

By Daniel Eness

A memorial.

A relic.

The greatest ocean liner to sail the Atlantic.

The true treasures of the RMS Titanic: her passengers and crew, victims and survivors, trapped in that brief moment when the world's tallest building, its most luxurious hotel, and its grandest expression of wealth could walk on water.

In 100 years, the RMS Titanic has only gotten bigger.

But there is a forgotten treasure of the Titanic, a spirit, a precious memory that was ignored, and then lost.

Out of the icy darkness, it returns.

And with it, so do her ghosts.

Collecting a half dozen stories of the uncanny, the improbable and the unreal, Tales of the Haunted Titanic shares the ghostly alternate history of the Unsinkable and the Unthinkable.

Some stories include:

A mystery surrounds the funeral of one of the survivors, and the only clue is provided by one of the victims.

As a talented embalmer begins to draw bodies from the deep, a body draws him into the depths.

One survivor is unaccounted for: a song which outlives its performers.

A bankrupt aristocrat follows a dark trail of revenge to Boiler Room Number 6.

A giant of the deep rouses from a ghostly slumber, taking a chance to make history at history's end.

Collecting:
Titanic Rising
On Jack Thayer's Watch
The Autumn Ice of Springtime
The Unsinkable Supernatant
Pronouncing the Mackay-Bennett, and Introducing:

The Giant, Ben Guggenheim, a new story exclusive to Tales of the Haunted Titanic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel Eness
• Release date: Apr 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476111322

Daniel Eness

Daniel Eness writes stories of strange adventure where the hero always wins, except those times when he dies spectacularly in an explosion. He lives in Iowa with his family of six, for whom he writes of the churning seascape of the soul, deep evil and the hope that has overcome them both. His work has appeared in Stupefying Stories, Ideomancer, Diagram and Brain Harvest Magazine, and, in 2012, Eortholic Press will release two novels, a novella and a collection of short adventures.

Book preview

TALES OF THE HAUNTED TITANIC

Daniel Eness

Published by Eortholic Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Daniel Eness

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Commemorating the 100th Observance

Acknowledgements

Titanic Rising

On Jack Thayer's Watch

The Unsinkable Supernatant

Pronouncing the Mackay-Bennett

The Autumn Ice of Springtime

The Giant, Ben Guggenheim

Afterword

Author's Note

Commemorating the 100th Observance

...On the same day all the fountains of the great deep were burst open, and the sky’s windows were opened.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to John B. Thayer V, The Titanic Museum of Branson, the Titanic Historical Society, Tosca Lee, Bruce Bethke, Mike Duran, Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kevin Kaiser, Ted Dekker and the Ragged Edge.

Titanic Rising

Unknown to quite nearly all living souls, Polaris, the North Star, is not merely a prominent body in the night sky. It is a tunnel.

As its beam strikes the Earth's atmosphere, it carries with it the normal optical phenomena of starlight. It also carries an intangible essence - something akin to a human soul or a disembodied spirit. If that essence had a shape, which it most decidedly does not, it might be akin to an impossible passageway, an invisible mineshaft engineered by use of non-Euclidian geometry.

That tunnel touches against the surface of the North Atlantic in a cosmic ebb and flow, sometimes barely glancing against the water, other times snaking down to the crushed black ocean floor where cold silt is kicked into clouds on rare occasion by the glowing aliens of the deep.

Over the course of countless centuries, nothing, it is said, ever navigates the tunnel, yet.

That does not stop the prophecy that has been passed, ship to ship, among the ghost fleets of the World Ocean.

It starts with a mirrored fragment of history:

~~~~

Shortly after the beginning of time, there was a giant. He was cruel to his enemies and blasphemous to his own god but clever and powerful, fanciful and loyal and fatherly to those who followed him without question. He was the greatest shipmaker to ever live: the father of the sail and oar, but also the anchor and even a remarkable device that spun at the pressure of fire-boiled water, propelling ships, without wind, at remarkable speed.

Now, this giant was not the sort from fairy tales, the impossibly large beast with the heart the size of a house. He stood merely - if merely is the word - not quite twice as tall as a short man. He wore heavy leathers on his back to defend such a large target from backstabbing or other treachery, the only sort of stealthy violence which could ever bring him down. In a fair fight, he was unbeatable, having proved it repeatedly over the course of centuries.

He was as long-lived as a vampire, and as sun-cooked as a naked sword in the desert.

His name was Marjik. His brow was high and learned, his fists like rock hammers. His henchmen, hirelings and worshippers believed him to be the father of sorcery, though, in truth, he was only a master pupil of its arts.

While nagging a scroll for its secrets one midnight in his lamped garden, Marjik foretold, in an unknown tongue - the language before the first word - of a great ocean.

In those days, seas were quite small, and the world surrounded in a cooling mist. An ocean was an unknown thing. According to the scroll, this new ocean would be so vast as to divide into four and still cover the earth in devastation.

Marjik fell upon the limestone altar where the scroll rested. It cracked and he landed with thunder against the ground and did not move. When his chief drycrafter and bodyguards rushed to the scene of the accident, they found the gargantuan man, face down, his body shuddering. With laughter.

Hours later, when he was able to regain his stern demeanor and capacity for language, he said, gasping, Flood.

His retinue looked on him with a mix of fear and confusion.

Like the crop-waters, from the sea? said his chief drycrafter, trying to be helpful.

No, said the giant, chuckling deeply like the sound of many fountains. Bigger. Much bigger. A blanket of water that will cover the earth. No land, only water.

The drycrafter trembled. He cast his nervous, weeping eyes around the garden, to the burnished walls of the palace, up the hill, to the splendorous temple, and tried to imagine it all under water.

Why then, master, do you laugh? If the land is to be buried in water?

Because, said the giant, we will sail upon it, and rule the world.

Marjik began the most elaborate shipbuilding project that anyone had ever seen. It took nearly two years of ceaseless labor by his slaves and artisans working to the point of death, and occasionally the single mortal step past it, simply to build the scaffolding out of lightweight poles, climbing ever skyward and for many fathoms in either direction.