Jim Morgan and the Pirates of the Black Skull

by James Raney

  “It’s called moonwater, Master James,” Phineus said. “It is one of the rarest and most precious liquids in the world, worth one hundred times its weight in gold. Now, the night you fled, I believe your father must have given you an old, weathered parchment, perhaps with a note written upon it. Did he do so Jim? For try as I might, I could not find the parchment in the house no matter how long I searched.”

  “He did, Phineus!” Jim reached into his pocket for his box. Opening it, he carefully withdrew his father’s letter. “When he was poisoned, father spent his last moments writing me this letter.” Jim held the folded page forth to his former teacher with a trembling hand.

  “I thought he might have, for your father was a man of many secrets, Master James. Not all of them did he share with me.” A wise smile stretched over Phineus’s soot and tear-stained face. “He never told me of his secret journey at sea, nor how he came to possess that parchment or this vial of moonwater. Those tales he shared only with Hudson, his faithful valet, God rest that man’s soul. But before he entrusted me with the moonwater, he gave me a hint as to its purpose. Open the letter, young Master.”

  Jim unfolded the parchment. As always, the newly rising moon lit the letters of his father’s note fresh upon the page. Though they had seen this before, Lacey and the Ratts caught their breath in awe and George gave a low whistle. This was magic, and it tingled their blood and prickled their skin.

  “Your father was wise to hide his words in such enchanted ink,” Phineus continued. “Moonwater is concentrated light of the full moon itself. I believe it has the power to unlock even deeper mysteries still.” Phineus took Jim by the hand and turned the letter over. When the old man held the vial in his bent fingers between the moon and the page, a thin, blue beam lit upon the yellowed parchment. Like light shimmering off water, shapes and letters appeared on the paper, illuminating the dark and flinging their glowing forms on the faces of the small group gathered round. Jim could not be sure, but it seemed to be the faint outline of a map drawn on the aged paper. Phineus passed the light over the parchment from top to bottom then once more curled his fingers over the vial, extinguishing the blue glow and the enchanted glamour on the back of Jim’s letter.

  “I never asked your father what secret the parchment held, nor did I ever surrender to the temptation to use it myself, though the desire was great, especially for an old tutor who values wisdom and knowledge above all else. Those things were not meant for me to know, young Master. But they are meant for you.” Phineus pressed the vial into Jim’s empty hand and closed Jim’s fingers into a fist. “Wait awhile until your head and your heart clear from this loss, then perhaps this will guide you on your way.”

  “Thank you, Phineus,” Jim said quietly. He took both the vial and the letter and tucked them into his box, which he then placed into his pocket.

  “Speakin’ o’ makin’ our ways,” MacGuffy interjected from the back of the group. “It be far too late for travellin’ tonight, and the carriage we brought be already gone back to town. There be not enough gold amongst the lot o’ us to buy a room for even a single evenin’. So perhaps we shall rest in yonder stable, if there be even a little straw for our beds. Then tomorrow, to the lighthouse we shall return.”

  “Will you come with us, Phineus?” Jim asked. But only a look at his old tutor’s face gave Jim the answer.

  “No, Master James. I shall always be your servant and your teacher, but my frail body is too old for such adventures. I shall go to Kent to stay with my sister for a time. Perhaps I shall find another family to teach before I grow too old and too frail to carry out my duties with honor. But never will I find another house as great as the house of Morgan.”

  “I’ll get it back, Phineus,” Jim swore then. He swore it with all the heat and fury of a young boy’s heart caught afire. “I don’t know how, but I will. I’ll find treasure like my father did. I’ll do whatever it takes. I’ll get back at the Cromiers for this and I’ll rebuild our house and I’ll make it an honorable family again. I swear it.”

  Phineus pulled Jim close and held him there for a moment. Then he stood again with a groan, one hand on his old back. Phineus shook the hands of the Ratts and MacGuffy and bowed his head politely to Lacey. Then lastly and again, he took Jim’s hand in his own.

  “Farewell, Lord Morgan. I have no doubt I shall hear your name again, attached to the beginning and end of a great adventure, I’m sure. If I am still alive on that day, I trust you shall call on me if needed, and I will come.” Then the old tutor walked away, disappearing over the hill and into the night.

  Jim and his friends watched old Phineus hobble away. They were about to walk down to the stables when the rattle of wagon wheels and the clang of bells on reins came from the road. A prisoner’s carriage rounded the bend. Next to the driver sat a constable of Rye, a blue cloak over his shoulders, blue tricorn hat on his head, and the badge of the King’s Men on his breast.

  “Good evenin’, sires,” the constable said, tipping his hat to the clan and MacGuffy, who stood beside Jim near the road. “Tis an evil night indeed. Though I know it will do little to bring back what’s been lost, we’ve a prisoner we believe wrought this misfortune on Morgan Manor. Caught her screamin’ and rantin’ in the haunted forest. Thought at first she was one of the ghoulies herself! We’re takin’ her to London for justice.”

  “Nonsense!” A shrill voice screamed from the back of the wagon. George, Lacey, Peter, and Paul, jumped at the sound – all except for Jim.

  Jim knew that voice.

  He knew it from his childhood.

  “You shall refer to me as DAME, you common dog! For it was I who gave grace to the wretched name of Morgan and I who gave that pile of rocks even a touch of nobility. For I am still as noble as…as a queen!” The voice cackled from the black bowels of the wagon, from the shadows behind the bars.

  But shadows or no, Jim knew to what villain this voice belonged.

  FIVE

  im’s teeth clamped so hard that he heard them grind together in his ears. He squeezed his fists so tight that his fingernails bit half-moon cuts into the palms of his hands.

  “You’re no Dame, Aunt Margarita!” Jim shouted, his voice hoarse and raspy. “My father threw you out of his house for being a liar!” A sharp gasp echoed from the blackness behind the bars of the prisoner’s carriage.

  “I know that voice,” the mad cackle said. “But it cannot be, can it? It could not possibly be my dear little friend, James Francis Morgan, could it? This I must see with my own eyes.”

  From the shadows, two hands reached through the bars. The pale fingers were ringed with diamond and gold that glistened in the rising moonlight. Finger by finger the bejeweled hands gripped the bars tight, and with a fierce tug, yanked Aunt Margarita’s face into view.

  Paul and Lacey leapt back from the wagon and George and Peter braced themselves at the sight. But who could blame them? The old woman had become more ghoul than flesh and blood. No longer as round and pale as the full moon, her madness had sucked the life from her, a bit at a time. Dame Margarita’s body was as drained as her mind and her soul. Her wrinkles folded deeply. Black bags hung low beneath her eyes, open wide and unblinking. Even her platinum blonde wig was gone. Only thinning wisps of gray remained, dead and lifeless as the gypsy witch’s that once cursed Jim’s box.

  Aunt Margarita’s wide, watery eyes passed over each of the clan until they reached Jim’s face. It was then she reared back her head, erupting in laughter, deep and throaty like a hungry wolf’s howl.

  “Well, well, well, so you survived after all,” Margarita said gleefully. “Old Cromie thought you might have. I was certain, oh so certain, that you were too soft to survive beyond the manor walls - without your servants, your playthings, or your chocolates. But perhaps I was wrong about you, my boy.”

  “It’ll take more than you and the Cromiers to finish me off, hag!”

  “Mind your tongue and mind your words!” Margarita pressed her face close to
the bars. With bulging eyes she glared down on Jim. “You eluded Bartholomew in London. Well done! And I can tell you that his father was none too pleased with him at that. But by your company and those hopeless rags you now wear, you failed to find your father’s treasure, didn’t you? And now look!” Aunt Margarita jabbed at the blackened ruins before her with a crooked finger, a bent smile upon her face. “All that was the house of Morgan is gone.” Jim shook from head to toe at his Aunt’s taunts. All the hurt and disappointment of his broken dreams bubbled up within him.

  “You poisoned my father, the greatest captain on the seas! You tried to kill me, and now you’ve burnt down my home. I hope they throw you in a dark hole at the end of some forgotten corridor in a forgotten prison, so long that you never see the light of day again!”

  Dame Margarita squeezed the bars until her knuckles rose up on her hands. The sinews in her arms and neck drew taut as straining ropes. Her face trembled and her eyes bulged in their sockets.

  “You think you know it all, don’t you, you fool? You think Lindsay Morgan was some great man of honor? That he was some unblemished image of nobility and goodness? You don’t know half of what you think you know. If you knew what I knew … if you knew what Count Cromier told me. If you knew what that Treasure of the Ocean really was and what Lindsay Morgan’s thievery truly cost, you would not speak so boldly to me.” Aunt Margarita pulled one fist from her bars and leveled a finger at Jim’s face.

  “If you knew who you were, James Morgan, Son of Earth and Son of Sea. If you knew what fate lay in store for you, you would wish the soldiers had caught you in the forest that night. Mark my words, boy, you shall come to curse the day you were born.” Aunt Margarita began to wag her finger back and forth, cackling laughter once more lacing her words. What little reason left in her eyes slipped away. “You’ll see! You’ll see, you’ll see!” Margarita released her bars, sinking back into the shadows of the box until only her echoing laughter remained.

  “That will be enough of that,” the Constable said. He nodded his head toward Jim and his friends. “I’m sorry for your loss. Have no fear, though, we shall see her to justice.” Then the driver flicked the reins and the carriage jerked down the road. But before it turned round the hill and out of sight, Aunt Margarita’s shrill voice cried out once more.

  “You’ll see, Jim Morgan! You’ll see!”

  “Be givin’ no mind to a mad witch’s words, lad,” MacGuffy began to say. But Jim hardly heard the old pirate. The weight of all the sorrow and sadness broke the dam in his heart. All by themselves Jim’s legs began to run. Hot tears burned in his eyes as he ran over the hill toward the stables, which was all that remained of the great house. Smoke from Morgan Manor stung his nose and singed his throat as he ran, but the pain in his heart ached far worse than any heat.

  “Come back, Jim!” Lacey and George called from the top of the hill. Their words never reached Jim’s ears. He ran alone in a bubble of hurt, with all the rest of the world on the other side. As he ran, his little box rattled against his side in his pocket. It was once again his only possession in all the world.

  SIX

  im ran as hard and fast as he could, churning up sand and ocean water as he pounded down the beach. He struggled to hold back his tears and slapped away the few drops that spilled onto his cheeks. On and on Jim ran until night fell like a blanket over the coast and the stars appeared in the darkened sky.

  When Jim had run until his burning legs were finally ready to give out, he slowed to a walk, coughing for air with his head hung low. He looked around with stinging eyes to find himself on an unfamiliar, rocky stretch of beach. No homes or houses lit the nearby hills and Jim cursed himself a fool for running so far on his own. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets with a defeated sigh and turned to walk back in the direction from which he’d come.

  As Jim trudged through the sand he kicked at stones and cursed the Cromiers and Aunt Margarita for all the evil they had inflicted upon him. Along the way, and as angry young men often do, Jim began to formulate fantastic and impossible ways to get back at those fiends. He grew so distracted by his miserable plotting that he reared back to kick a particularly large stone without realizing that it was quite a bit bigger than he suspected. He struck the stone square and very nearly shattered his toe, which sent him yelping like a pup and hopping up and down on one foot. Jim was about to swear retribution upon all the bloody stones in England in addition to his enemies when the sound of pipes playing a sad song caught his attention from just up ahead.

  Jim ceased hopping around immediately and bit his upper lip to keep from howling. His cheeks burned at the thought of being seen breaking his own foot on a rock, so he tried to walk casually down the beach. This was nearly impossible, however, with a smashed toe, tired legs, and an aching head. But instead of letting him limp away with even a shred of his dignity intact, the pipes grew louder the further Jim walked. In only ten yards or so, he found a man sitting cross-legged upon a large stone, facing the sea and playing a strange flute with twin pipes. Jim furrowed his brow and approached the man slowly. It seemed strange to so plainly see this fellow on the rock, and to so clearly hear his sad song, Jim thought. For not a few moments before, when he had run past this very place, he had seen no man nor heard any song.

  Jim finally drew up to the rock and his curiosity only deepened. The flute-player was perhaps the smallest man Jim had ever seen. Even perched upon his rock the gentleman came up only as far as Jim’s shoulders. He wore a tiny suit of green breeches with a brown waistcoat and cream shirt - clothes, Jim was quite sure, that could have been fitted for a small child. Yet the man’s bald head shone in the moonlight and a neatly trimmed gray beard hung from his chin. Jim thought by the man’s face that he was perhaps only a few years younger than old MacGuffy.

  The little man kept on playing his song as though he never saw Jim at all. His fingers danced along the pipes and his eyes remained fixed upon the sea. It was as though he was hypnotized by the waves. Jim was about to clear his throat or say hello, if nothing else but to see if the man might reply, when the diminutive musician blew a final, wavering note and at last pulled the flute from his lips.

  “Lovely night for a stroll,” said the flute-player with a voice not nearly as small as the man himself. “Lovely night for even as angry and woeful a stroll as yours, I’d say.”

  “I’m sorry?” Jim said. He was taken aback by the man’s blunt words and felt once more ashamed that a total stranger might have seen him muttering to himself and kicking huge rocks like a fool. “Just so you know, I wasn’t even crying or anything,” Jim threw in with a ridiculous measure of indignation. “There’s nothing wrong with me at all!” One eyebrow arched high upon the old man’s bald head, and his eyes flicked for the first time from ocean to Jim’s face.

  “A young man, racing like the wind down a dark beach with tears so thick in eyes that he nearly runs over a poor fellow playing his flute, without even knowing he did so, obviously has something wrong with him indeed! In fact, I would go so far as to say such a young man is in desperate need of a drastic change in fortune. It is quite clear to me, young sir, that you are afflicted - afflicted with an affliction as plain as the nose on your face.”

  “Afflicted?” Jim said, a bit of bitterness trickling into his voice. “What would you know about it?” Yet in spite of Jim’s irritability, he could hardly tear his eyes from the pipe player upon the rock. The old gentleman’s eyes were clear as glass and green as leaves in spring. They struck Jim as being somehow very old, older than even the hills and the rocks on the beach. Jim felt the gaze of those eyes cut through his flesh and bone down to his soul, as a cold wind cuts through clothes to sting the skin.

  “You, my boy,” the man said, those unnerving eyes fixed on Jim’s face. “Are afflicted with a broken heart.”

  Jim thought of denying it, but what was the use? The truth was written all over his face and it would not be tucked away. Jim’s heart was utterly and completely b
roken and there were no two ways about it. The old man seemingly took Jim’s silence as an admission and reached out to tap him sharply on the top of the head with his flute.

  “So,” he said. “Perhaps you and I should discuss this broken heart and these unfortunate circumstances in which you find yourself. Then, just maybe, we shall see if we might not be able to procure you a remedy.”

  “No offense,” Jim replied. “But you hardly know a thing about me or my problems, sir. Even if you did, I’m not so sure there’s much you could do about any of it at all.” The moment those words left Jim’s mouth the old man clucked his tongue and threw up his hands as though Jim had just uttered the most ridiculous words he had ever heard.

  “Youths these days - never thinking things through. Don’t you suppose that a fragile old man, especially one as tiny and defenseless as this one, sitting here on this rock all by his lonesome in the middle of the night, with god knows what manner of thieves and scoundrels lurking about, would not have at least one or two tricks up his sleeve?”

  The little man snapped the flute to his lips and ripped off a trill that sent a spark through Jim’s arms and legs. He then flicked his sharp eyes over Jim’s shoulder with a wink and a nod. Jim looked back in that direction and nearly shouted in startled surprise. A wooden carriage sat on a patch of grass just beyond the sand. A bright fire burned beside the camp, crackling over a pile of large, cut logs.

  Jim’s mouth fell open and his brow furrowed deep. He could understand how he might have missed the small man, alone on a rock in the dark. But there was no way Jim would have missed an entire camp, burning fire and all, just sitting on the edge of the beach. No horse or mule tracks of any sort led toward or from the inviting campsite. It seemed to Jim as though it had all simply appeared out of thin air.