The Wailing Ships

By Jon Jacks

The Sprig o’ Thyme no longer hunts whales.
The captain’s enlisted his first girl, me, because he finds my singing enchanting.
It seems it’s perfect for luring a new prey.
Mermaids.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Jacks
• Release date: Mar 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370399352

Jon Jacks

While working in London as, first, an advertising Creative Director (the title in the U.S. is wildly different; the role involves both creating and overseeing all the creative work in an agency, meaning you’re second only to the Chairman/President) and then a screenwriter for Hollywood and TV, I moved out to an incredibly ancient house in the countryside.On the day we moved out, my then three-year-old daughter (my son was yet to be born) was entranced by the new house, but also upset that we had left behind all that was familiar to her.So, very quickly, my wife Julie and I laid out rugs and comfortable chairs around the huge fireplace so that it looked and felt more like our London home. We then left my daughter quietly reading a book while we went to the kitchen to prepare something to eat.Around fifteen minutes later, my daughter came into the kitchen, saying that she felt much better now ‘after talking to the boy’.‘Boy?’ we asked. ‘What boy?’‘The little boy; he’s been talking to me on the sofa while you were in here.’We rushed into the room, looking around.There wasn’t any boy there of course.‘There isn’t any little boy here,’ we said.‘Of course,’ my daughter replied. ‘He told me he wasn’t alive anymore. He lived here a long time ago.’A child’s wild imagination?Well, that’s what we thought at the time; but there were other strange things, other strange presences (but not really frightening ones) that happened over the years that made me think otherwise.And so I began to write the kind of stories that, well, are just a little unbelievable.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Cold blows the wind to my true love,

And gently falls the rain.

I never had but one true love,

And in greenwood he lies slain.

Cold Blows the Wind

She was called Cornucopia.

She brought to our small port all manner of exotic goods.

Spices the like of which no one living here had ever tasted.

Silks as smooth as water upon your skin, and as vibrantly coloured as the most glorious rainbow.

Fruits we’d never imagined could exist, let alone that we would one day slake our newly found thirst for their succulent juices.

Wine we could have sworn was meant for gods, not poor fisherfolk like us.

All at ridiculously low prices too!

Because the Cornucopia had also brought something else from abroad.

A disease.

*

We’d thought at first, of course, that the sailors so freely parting with their money had simply been at sea too long to spend it wisely, or sparingly.

Their parlour, their weariness, could also be put down, naturally, to an overly long voyage.

As for their retching in the streets, their staggering gait: well, they were overindulging in our public house and bars, weren’t they?

It wasn’t until we realised there were fewer of them showing up each day that it finally dawned on us that they were dying.

Those spared to live another day simply slipped the bodies over the side of the ship; but only on a night, and only on the side facing out to sea.

The Cornucopia’s captain had been one of the very first to suffer such a fate, when the crew he had insisted on quarantining had mutinied and murdered him.

My childhood sweetheart Ben was amongst the very first of our village to die.

*

Chapter 2

A merchant ship a long time had sail-ed,

Long time being captive out at sea.

The weather proved so unsettled,

Which brought them to extremity.

Nothing on board, poor souls, to cherish,

Nor could step one foot on freedom’s shore,

Poor fellows they were almost starving,

There was nothing left but skin and bone.

The Ship in Distress

We set the Cornucopia on fire.

With their heavily pitched rigging, their wooden hulls, the vast canvas sheets forming their sails, ships are so effortlessly easy to set alight.

All it took was an old cannon, one used to defend the village years ago but now thought of as being redundant, loaded with metal shot heated in the blacksmith’s fire.

The sailors that jumped ship and tried to swim our way were clubbed or shot as they tried to clamber ashore.

But it was all too late, of course.

The disease had caught hold amongst us.

Soon we were burning our own houses.

Next, we were burning the dead, many of whom had fallen in the streets, for fear that carrying them off to the graveyard only helped spread the infection.

News of the calamity besetting our small port soon spread wider abroad.

And we found ourselves quarantined.

No one from any nearby village visited us anymore.

The roads, the rivers, even those areas of reasonably passable countryside surrounding our port, were blocked and patrolled by wary, well-armed gangs of men frightened into being especially callous.

Our boats were prevented from leaving port, our harbour entrance blocked with deliberately sunken wrecks.

No more ships pulled into our port.

Until, one day, a vessel as silent as the night arrived.

And for its figurehead, it had a mummified mermaid.

*

The ship – appropriately enough, as its sails could have been black shreds of sky, its hull the dark pitch of looming storm-tossed waves – had appeared overnight.

Unheard.

Unseen.

It had carried no lights that might have made us aware of its approach.

The harbour walls, unused for so long, similarly carried no lights.

And yet this dark ship had navigated through their narrow opening, while also avoiding the supposedly impassable sunken wrecks.

Maybe the unseen crew, so careless as to let their ship fall into such a disgracefully unseaworthy condition, had merely let their already sorely damaged hull scrape over any obstacles.

Maybe it would sink before us at any moment, its bottom every bit as holed and rotten as its superstructure.

Most frightening and troubling of all, however, was that alarmingly morbid figurehead, the mermaid strapped and nailed to its front, where she had also been left to rot.

More disturbingly still, perhaps, was that no one else amongst my remaining friends could see it, this hideously shrivelled remnant of what must once have been fluidly gorgeous.

How could I be so sure it wasn’t just a carving, as rotten and as uncared for as the rest of the ship?

Wasn’t it really just some battered sculpture of a Queen of the Seas, a Fairy Princess?

It wasn’t possible to tell either way, as long as the ship remained so far out at anchor, rather than pulling into the harbourside.

I laughed.

I had to agree.

And yet, deep down inside, where inherited, unconscious truths still reside, I knew I was right, and they were wrong.

The ship’s figurehead was indeed a real mermaid.

One hunted, killed and filleted long, long ago.

*

Chapter 3

And he took her by the lily-white hand,

Saying, ‘Married we shall be,

Then you shall have a bold fisherman,

To row you on the sea,

To row you on the sea;

Then you shall have a bold fisherman,

To row you on the sea.’

The Bold Fisherman

There were still no signs of life aboard the silently anchored ship.

Even the lapping waves hung back from kissing its dark sides with their familiar smack and hiss.

No lights shone from its spars, or its cabins.

No strains of violin or trilling of the flute could be heard.

Sailors neither emerged to furl the ripped sails, nor to row to shore, to spend hard-earned wages in our taverns.

And yet, one night the captain of the ship appeared at the door to my house.

‘I’m here,’ he said, ‘to carry away your mother.’

Without waiting for any invite, he stepped across the threshold.

*

My mother, I’d heard, had once quite easily been the most beautiful girl in the village.

So exquisitely beautiful that she thought herself far too fine for any simple fisherman.

Only a rich lord, capable of appreciating such beauty, would ever be good enough for my mother.

By the time I was old enough to be aware of such things, I couldn’t see it myself.

No; not even a hint that, at some time in her past, she might have been beautiful.

Then again, life in a village such as ours is never easy.

Least of all for a mother with no one willing to claim responsibility for her child.

I’d also heard that she had the most beautiful singing voice.

Heard as in being told; not, unfortunately, in the sense that I’d ever actually heard her singing.

But I could believe this.

For my own voice, she used to tell me, is also dangerously gorgeous.

*

Chapter 4

When shall we meet again, sweetheart?

When shall we meet again?

When the oaken leaves that fall from the trees,

Are green and spring up again.

The Unquiet Grave

It had been my singing that had drawn the captain to my door, I was sure of it.

And yet I’m also sure I had managed to avoid my usual, unintentionally seductive tones; the enchantingly exotic mingling of low and high notes my mother had so often warned me to be wary of.

This had been a lament, after all; a song full of tears, and sorrow.

The disease had reached out to caress my mother. And her increasingly pitiful condition had reached out to caress my voice, to add a trill of melancholy beneath everything I sang.

‘If you have no one to care for you now,’ the captain said, as his men bore my mother away, an upended tall, corner cupboard serving as a makeshift coffin, ‘you are welcome to join us.’

‘I don’t know anything of ships,’ I had to shamefacedly admit. ‘I couldn’t be of any use to you.’

‘On the contrary,’ the captain replied, a sparkle of intrigue flickering in his otherwise dead eyes, ‘you can sing; and I’ve only ever heard mermaids sing as beautifully as you can.’

*

It surprises me a little when I hear the crunch of boots on cobbles and – later, as we board the boat tied up on the harbourside – the greedy glug of water upon the boat’s hull and its oars.

I’d feared that the men around me were somehow supernaturally quiet.

But their silence, obviously, is the respect for the dead – and the dying – shown by reverential mourners.

Few lights burn in the windows of the houses passed as we’d followed the narrow streets winding their way down towards the water. Where a candle flickered, it was no doubt to illuminate someone’s last moments.

My mother is laid lengthways along the boat’s centre, still set between her pallbearers, now languorously pulling on the oars.

The captain sits at the stern, having shown and helped me into the prow.

‘Sing girl,’ he says bluntly. ‘Your mother would be glad to know your days of gutting fish are over.’

*

Chapter 5

Fair lady, lay your robes aside,

No longer glory in your pride.

And now, sweet maid, make no delay,

Your time is come,

Your time is come and you must away.

Lady, leave your robes aside,

No longer glory in your pride.

No more in life you may abide,

So come along with me.

Death and the Lady

My song ripples out through the darkness.

Could it be true that my mother also used to be able to sing like this?

If so, why did I never hear her singing?

Was she so unhappy that she couldn’t draw on all the necessary emotions anymore?

Looking back at her now, laid out in what passes for her coffin, I can’t help but think hers was a wasted life; if she really ever had been beautiful, then the unforgivingly freezing winds swirling across the harbour must have slaked it all away from her.

Her face is white, her features sculpted out by a life of worries and disappointments.

Her hands are red, as cracked as dried earth, the gutting of cold fish every bit as cruel for those taking on the task.

Her hair is bedraggled, knotted and dry, for she long ago gave up any ritual brushing or combing.

The only thing about her that still sparkles is the ring.

The ring she would never dare wear on her finger.

The ring that she wears instead strung about her neck, hanging from a filthy necklace of woven leather.

It’s a ring that I once thought she had thrown away a while ago, casting it into the deepest part of the harbour.

For it was the ring that the Prince of the Stones had given me.

*

‘Will we bury her at sea?’

The sea, once again, sucks and swirls against the sides now of both our boat and the dark wall of the ship we’re clambering aboard. The men are efficient, silent, as they go about their appointed tasks, quickly hauling my mother’s coffin up onto the ship’s deck with ropes and pulleys.

The Sprig o’ Thyme she’s called, no doubt after the song, and despite being more of an old crone.

‘We’ll put her below with the others, for now,’ the captain replies, gruff yet with a hint of probably rare consideration for my fears.

Others?

I didn’t wish to trouble him further with any probing questions.

Clearly, this was a ship that removed your dead, when the dead weren’t fit or safe for burial in your churchyard.

The sea would gladly take them, if the ground wouldn’t. And their bodies would remain reasonably whole, in readiness for their resurrection, rather than being burnt to cinders.

Didn’t these men fear that they would catch the disease, which usually seemed to be the fate of anyone foolish enough to agree to handle the bodies of anyone who had succumbed to a plague?

Perhaps this was a different kind of disease; one that wasn’t passed on by the those already dead. There are, after all, so many different types of plague, each one spreading its works in its own personal manner

Even so, what were these seamen doing in a disease-ridden port anyway, when any sensible man would stay as far away as possible?

I had heard that some people thankfully remain free of plague; otherwise, how would there ever be any survivors?

A ship full of survivors; perhaps, yes, that’s what this ship is.

They’ve managed to escape their own plagued port, only to discover that too few of them possess the necessary skills to maintain and run a ship.

So how would they continue to survive, unless they found another way of making a living? A living ferrying the diseased of other stricken ports out to sea,