“What’s all the trouble?”
The old man came close to me and whispered: “We make Vostok Island to-morrow, Captain Andy says, and I’m to go ashore for birds’ eggs!”
“All the more reason for you to sleep to-night.”
“But Perks?”
“What about him?”
Seaside leaned against the weather rail and let his sharp little eyes wander aloft. He shook his head knowingly, and again the fatuous grin played across his mouth; but in another moment he was whispering his story to me — whispering it because, as he said, he did not want Perks to overhear.
Three years ago, according to Seaside, the Pirara was not a haunted ship; but one day Captain Andy decided to put into Vostok Island for sea birds’ eggs, and then all the trouble started. They came along the reef in the afternoon, and Seaside was landed with some empty boxes for the eggs. The reef boat put back to the schooner, leaving him alone. The old man waded through the shallows and climbed up the beach with his boxes, untroubled by an inkling of the harrowing experience which lay ahead.
It was a dreary place, he told me, of coral formation and without more than six feet elevation on its highest point. Not a coconut tree grew there, nor a bush, nor a blade of grass; but inland the island was overgrown with great puka trees, whose huge soft and porous trunks towered straight and slimy two hundred feet in the air, and there broke into a mass of foliage so dense that only a dismal leaden light seeped through, lugubrious, as is the fading refulgence of twilight. The ground swarmed with black Norwegian rats and coconut crabs, the latter a foot long, their bodies scarlet-red, their eyes protruding, their claws powerful enough to snap off a man’s finger. Millions of birds roosted like owls on the limbs of the trees, squawking with a deafening clamor, leaving their perches by the thousand as the old native passed beneath them. Other than these there was no sign of life on that unearthly island.
Seaside felt the awe of the unknown gnaw his bones; his knees weakened and his skin became clammy as he picked his way deep into the jungle, climbing over the trunks of fallen giants, stumbling into crab holes, sinking into quagmires of guano and decayed vegetation. He kept clear of the trunks of the trees, for, he said, they swarmed with rats and crabs climbing to the roosting birds to feed on their eggs and young. Often he could see fights carried on between them, when the boobies would pounce on the rats that were sucking their eggs, tear them from the limbs, and hurl them to the ground; or screaming birds would dive at and circle about a coconut crab that held a fledgling in its claws. It was a horrible scene of carnage that had been carried on for thousands of years — a death struggle between the species.
On into the island went Seaside, his boxes under his arms, hunting for an open space by the eastern beach where the terns should lay their eggs. The gloom of the jungle deepened, the air became rank and nauseating with the stench of sea birds’ droppings, decaying flesh, damp vegetation. And the deeper he penetrated the more alive the ground became with evil creeping things.
Suddenly he halted in panic terror, his hair on end and his eyes bulging. Directly in front of him, hanging by a long rope of bark, was a dead man! A few rags of cloth hung to him, a sailor cap sat jauntily on his head. He must have been long dead. Seaside shuddered when he told me that one arm had dropped off; its yellowed bones lay, rat-gnawed, on the ground.
Seaside did not know how long he stood staring at the dead man; but when he did regain enough courage to move he turned with a yell, dropped his boxes, and rushed wildly through the jungle, hunting for the outer beach! He must have run in circles, for an hour passed and still he was in the depth of the island. It seemed that the jungle, with its millions of loathsome creatures feeding on one another, had no end. Twice again he came upon the dead man, each time to increase his terror and send him rushing wildly away.
Several hours passed, when suddenly, it seemed, darkness closed about him, dense and impenetrable. The blackness pressed him from all sides as though a sable shroud had been thrown over him and he had been sunk deep in the sea. He staggered a few feet forward and bumped against a tree. A rat dropped on his head and ran down his body. All about him he could hear sharp squeals, the clicking of the crabs’ claws, and, above, the clamor of the birds, though they were quieter now except when a rat or a crab crept upon their young — then the air would be alive with their screams.
Seaside sank on his knees at the foot of the tree. Gradually he became calmer. “After all,” he reasoned, “the crabs and the rats can’t kill me; the worst that can happen will be a sleepless night on this island.” He felt a little better after this, but still far from easy. He told me an hour must have passed before he saw the ghost of Able-bodied Seaman Alexander Perks.
He had been staring into the darkness, his eyes shifting from side to side, when all at once a nebulous thing formed a few yards from him, danced back and forth among the trees, and then gradually took the shape of a man. It approached to within a few feet, bowed extravagantly, and lifted its hat. Seaside said that the jungle became aglow with an eerie light which disclosed the dead man a few feet to one side, swinging slightly now, while a dozen rats below his feet were leaping into the air, trying to get at him. After this Seaside lost cognizance of things.
When he came to, there was Perks, sitting on one of the boxes that he had brought ashore for eggs, talking in the hollow tone common among ghosts. “It’s a shame,” he was saying, “a beastly shame!”
Seaside snapped his eyes closed and started repeating the Lord’s Prayer, but still he could hear Perks muttering: “I see you’ve come to, now. It’s about time. ’Ere I’ve been marooned fer four years on this blinkin’ island, and the first bloke as comes ’asn’t the courtesy to treat me wid common civility. So strike me pink if it ain’t a shame!”
Seaside opened one eye a fraction of an inch. He noted that the specter appeared to have a kindly face; but he was far from reassured, so he snapped his eyes shut again and started trembling violently as again he went over the prayer.
“Prayin’, so ’elp me, prayin’!” moaned Perks. “But I suppose it is queer-like to see a man o’ my profession — Able-bodied Seaman I am, Alexander Perks, A.B. — on a bloomin’ island like this. But it’s all right, matey, I’m ’armless — only a poor marooned mariner wot’s died by ’is own ’and after two years of lonely and pathetic life on this blinkin’ desert island.”
Seaside opened both his eyes at this, for he felt sorry for the spirit. He had seen plenty of ghosts before, and though they always filled him with terror he realized that there were both the harmless and the vicious kinds.
“It must have been lonely,” he managed to gasp.
“Lonely ain’t no word fer it,” Perks said with a shake of his head. “It’s been unsocial as ’ell. I’ve been livin’ a retired and ’omeless life widout even a bloke to play draughts wid!”
Here Seaside saw tears stream down the poor fellow’s cheeks. “You like to play draughts?” he asked, his fright now gone.
The ghost’s eyes brightened with an unearthly light. “It’s been my lifelong ’abit,” he replied, “and even since my late and lamented end it bides by me.” After a moment’s silence a wistful glow appeared in his eyes; he leaned forward and asked: “Matey, you don’t ’appen, let’s say, to play draughts, do you? I’ve the most ’andsome checkerboard on the north beach, beamy and symmetrical.”
Seaside told him that he played a game now and then, whereupon the ghost insisted that they go to the beach and play. Of course this suited the old native, for at least it would mean their getting out of the foul damp air of the jungle. He rose and followed Perks, who drifted among the trees, leaving a ghostly light behind him by which Seaside could with difficulty pick his way. In the course of a half hour they broke through the trees to the clean white outer beach, sparkling with moonlight and swept by a fine breeze from off the sea. Perks stopped before a large slab of coral.