Jim Morgan and the Pirates of the Black Skull

by James Raney

  “The red storm,” Steele whispered. The magic, shell-shaped cloud glimmered in his dark eyes. “It is our own fault that the storm even exists – Cromier’s, Lindsay’s, and mine. It was our tampering with the Treasure of the Ocean that unleashed it upon the world. It is a force of magic that even I fear. There is so much pain in the past, Egidio. Is it for me to tell a boy these things? These are things a father should tell a son. I am only a sailor - a pirate the boy hardly knows. I was his father’s greatest enemy as far as he knows. I do not know how to speak to children. I know only the ocean. I know only the lonely life of the sea.”

  “The boy has no father, Steele. He has only himself, and his friends. He needs guidance and wisdom. The ocean you know so well is a wise teacher, is it not? He has the right to know, Dread. He has the right to know that—”

  Egidio was about to say what Jim had the right to know, and Jim was nearly crawling through the wooden door to hear it. But a loud snap cracked in the hallway behind him, and a hissing noise rushed into his ears. Jim whirled around to find several things happening all at once.

  Lacey and George were practically on top of him, just as eager to hear Egidio’s next words as Jim. This, unfortunately, left Peter and Paul to their own devices. The two younger Ratts had wandered back to the paintings on the wall, where the brothers stood, frozen with fear, each with a finger on the canvas. Jim thought at first that one of them had broken the picture’s frame. But just as he and the others were about to make a break for it, Jim realized that the snap had come not from the paintings, but from a small blue flame at the hallway’s entrance. A column of smoke rose from the flame into the darkness – a column of smoke that took the shape of gray pirate, a smoky tendril of a cutlass in his hand.

  With an ear-piercing howl, the floating pirate streaked down the hallway, pulling his smoky blade back to strike. Peter and Paul screamed at the tops of their lungs. Then Lacey and George shouted for Peter and Paul to stop screaming. Then all five of them, with nowhere left to go, stumbled backwards through the doorway and into the sitting room.

  The gray pirate soared over the pile of children and faded away like a foggy ghost. But when Jim turned over, he found his nose not three inches from the very real boots of Dread Steele, who was glaring down on Jim and his friends with eyes so hot they could smelt iron.

  “Welcome to my shop, Jim Morgan,” said Egidio, an amused smile on the old man’s face, and a spark of laughter in his enormous eyes. There was no such humor to be found on the hardened face of Dread Steele.

  The walk to the Spectre through the streets of Shelltown was one of the longest and most miserable of Jim’s life. Dread Steele surged ahead of the others, his black cloak trailing behind him and a dark storm raging in his eyes. When they reached the pier Dread Steele flowed onto the ship like an angry wraith. The Captain never even gave Mufwalme a chance to apologize for allowing the children to escape. He barked for the big man to take Lacey and the Ratts to scrub the decks for their disobedience. But when Jim moved to follow his friends, Steele stayed him with a black glare.

  “As for Jim,” the Captain said, the edge on his voice sharp as a blade. “Mister Darkfeather will escort him to my quarters, where he shall wait for my return. He and I have much to discuss. Mister Gilly, we shall set a new course if you please!”

  As the Captain blew off to the quarterdeck and Mister Gilly’s wheel, Jim’s shoulders slumped and his stomach dropped nearly into his shoes. Lacey, George, Peter, and Paul gave Jim a horrified look before marching off to scrub the decks with Mister Mufwalme. Even MacGuffy, hardened man that he was, wore a nervous frown. Jim slowly turned on his heel and made his way toward the captain’s quarters with doom in his heart. When he got to the door, Cornelius patted him once with a soft wing on the back of the head.

  “Good luck, my son,” the raven said, then flew off to the mainmast. With a heavy sigh, Jim turned the handle and trudged into the captain’s quarters to wait for Dread Steele.

  SEVENTEEN

  im dared not sit in Dread Steele’s red leather chair, nor in fact, could he even bear to look at it. All he could imagine was the shadowy Captain sitting there in but a few moments, glaring at him with dark eyes. Neither did Jim wish to look out the window, which still hung open from his earlier escape. Everything in the cabin reminded Jim of some failure or warned him of some punishment to come.

  So, not wanting to look at anything and not wanting to touch anything, Jim closed his and eyes and jammed his hands deep into his pockets. There, his fingers brushed the ridges of his father’s box.

  At but the feel of one sharp corner, an itching tingle brewed in the darkness behind Jim’s eyes. The somber song of Philus Philonius’s flute began to drift through Jim’s mind. It pulled his thoughts inescapably to the enchanted rose beneath the wooden lid.

  All by itself Jim’s hand pulled the box from his pocket. When he held it in his hands, the flute song in his head grew so loud it was all Jim could hear. He held the box up before his eyes and pried the lid back with curious fingers. A violet glow lit his cheeks from within the box and a magical shimmer rippled from the blackened rose thorn. Jim stared at the burnt stem and petals, entranced by the shining glamour. The itch felt scratched just a little. Jim remembered that if he could get close enough, just close enough to see those wretched Cromiers, he could make all this pain and sorrow go away. All with just a prick of his thumb. Jim reached into the box, his fingertips passing over the ash-gray petals and blackened stem to the source of the violet flame – the glistening point of the rose’s thorn. Perhaps I could just test the sharpness now, Jim thought to himself. He lifted his finger over the thorn, just to give it a tap.

  “Mister Morgan,” Dread Steele’s voice suddenly called from behind Jim, accompanied by the slight creak of the door. The flute song in Jim’s mind snuffed out like a candle. Jim slapped shut the box and shoved it back in his pocket at the same time. The sound of ocean waves returned to Jim’s ears through the open window and the fog in his mind cleared. But Jim’s heart still hammered. He felt cold and pale, yet sweat prickled on his forehead and upper lip.

  Steele blew into the room and all but flew to his chair. He sat down in complete silence and placed his fingers against each other, pressing so hard that the tips turned white. Beneath the shadow of his hat, the pirate lord’s dark eyes bored into Jim’s face. Jim felt certain that the Captain knew - knew what was in his pocket. For a long, horrible second Jim was sure this conversation would be even worse than he had imagined. But after an awful silence, Steele reached up and pulled the hat from his head. It was as though a cloud passed from before the sun. The room seemed to brighten and the Captain appeared more a man and less a vengeful wraith.

  “Get yourself a chair, boy, and sit down.” Steele flicked his eyes to a corner by the door, where a wooden stool rested against the wall. Jim did as he was told without a word. His arms and legs trembled, and his insides were still furled into a nervous coil. Jim sat down and snuck a glance at Dread Steele. Even with the shadow removed from his face, the pirate captain seemed sterner than iron.

  “Let us review this morning’s activities, shall we?” Steele continued. “You have violated my commands, deceived a member of my crew, put yourself and your friends at risk, broken into my friend’s shop, and eavesdropped on a conversation not intended for your ears. What have you to say for yourself?” With each point on the long list of Jim’s misdeeds that day, his chin sunk a little lower to his chest. It all did sound rather awful when laid out that way, Jim thought. But the black rose thorn’s itch yet tickled the back of his mind. It quickly unfolded into a hot bloom of anger.

  “It’s not fair!” Jim suddenly shouted. “You didn’t lose your home. You didn’t lose everything you had! The Cromiers have taken everything from me!”

  “Not fair?” Steele replied. The Captain shook his head. “It’s not fair. Those are the words of the weak. Do you think the fish of the sea look at the shark’s teeth and powerful tail and say, ‘it
’s not fair?’ Life is a shark, Jim Morgan, and we but fish. No, it is not fair. But did the Cromiers force you to sneak off this ship? Did the Cromiers force you to break into Egidio’s shop? Those deeds are yours and yours alone.” Now that little bloom of heat grew quite a bit hotter in Jim’s chest. This time he looked Steele right in the eye.

  “I have a right to know why all this is happening to me. I have the right to get back what’s mine and set things straight!” The moment the words escaped Jim’s mouth, he immediately knew he should have left them there. Dread Steele was Lord of the Pirates. He was not accustomed to taking cheek from young men, or even grown ones at that. The cloud reformed over the Captain’s face. His lips trembled and his voice rang sharp enough to cut through the itch in Jim’s mind and freeze the fire in his chest.

  “I have heard such words before, Jim Morgan, from men who made the world worse under the guise of making it right. You and your father are two of a kind! Fools too clever for their own good!” Those words caught Jim hard. He suddenly remembered the last time he had a conversation with an adult like this one. It had been on the beach outside the home that was now a pile of ashes. It had been with his father, some of the last words they had ever spoken to each other in this world.

  “You would know better than I about my father, sir,” Jim said, quite a bit more quietly. His throat grew tight and his cheeks grew warm. He felt incredibly alone just then, sitting before the Captain. No friend stood at his side and he had nowhere left to run or call home.

  Jim expected no softness or mercy from the Lord of the Pirates. But when he finally dared to look again, he found the storm gone from Steele’s face. For a brief instant, a sorrow for breaking something he only intended to bend passed through the pirate’s eyes. Dread Steele rose from behind his desk and walked over to the open window. There he stood in silence. The breeze caught his cloak and ruffled it behind him. When the pirate captain spoke again, his voice was quiet and far away.

  “Did you know that your father and I were in school together?”

  “I’d heard that somewhere,” Jim said, remembering the story Janus Blacktail had told him only the night before. Steele reached out and touched the windowsill, running his hand along the length of it. When he turned back, Jim was surprised to find a smile on his face. For a moment, Dread Steele seemed the younger, more carefree man he must have once been.

  “There was a professor there named Toadswart. He was every bit as cheerful as his name suggested, if you can imagine. It was rumored that Toadswart never actually read any of the long, horrible papers he forced his miserable students to write. He simply counted the words to ensure you’d written every last letter he’d assigned. Yes, he was quite awful. Well, one day your father came to class and sat us both in the far back of the hall. Only a moment or two into the lecture, Lindsay produced two broom handles from beneath his cloak. We set our hats on the handles and our cloaks on the chairs. When old Toady turned to draw on the board we escaped through a window. They nearly expelled us both for that, as I recall. But it is still one of the best days I can remember. Had you any clue that your father was such a rascal as that?”

  “No,” Jim said, shaking his head. He tried to picture that stern man on the beach, a little silver shell between his fingers, causing trouble like Jim and the Ratts. But another question splashed into the middle of those pleasant imaginations. “Captain Steele, was my father a thief?” Jim asked, his voice cracking. “Was he a pirate? Did he steal the Treasure of the Ocean?” Dread Steele stood silent for a long, long breath. His eyes lay fixed on the ocean beyond the window.

  “Truth is a painting, Jim,” the Captain said. “Moments captured in time. To know a man’s whole life you would need a museum full of paintings – both the hideous, and the beautiful.” Steele looked Jim in the face. Sadness had stolen into his eyes. “When we were young, your father was my friend. He was my best friend in all the world. That should say as much about him as anything else. We do not always end up becoming what we hoped to be. Come here, let me show you something.”

  Jim came to stand beside the Captain at the window. He breathed deeply of the salty air and followed Steele’s gaze to the great blue expanse that lay behind the ship. The ocean stretched back to Spire Island and all the way to the edge of the world beyond. It made Jim feel so very small.

  “Look out there,” Steele said over the rhythm of the waves. “What do you see? The ocean is more than waves rolling beneath the wind and the clouds.” Steele leaned onto the windowsill and nodded back toward the quickly shrinking island behind the ship. “Back there, on the land - in the world, roads run everywhere. Roads to the cities and roads to the country. Roads to your home and roads to your work. They are so well traveled and so well marked that we forget there is more to the earth than the pressed dirt between one place and the next. But on the water, every direction is its own road.”

  “Ten-thousand roads,” Steele whispered. “On the open ocean, there is no one to choose your path but yourself. One day, ready or not, all of us must take our own road, and to any place we dare to venture. Learn to sail the seas, Jim, and you can go anywhere. You can be anything.”

  “Anywhere?”

  “Yes, anywhere. But wherever that may be, Jim, know that there will be storms, and come they shall. The worst storms are not even those of rain and lightning and thunder. The worst storms are magic and monsters, pain and loss. It is in such storms that so many men lose their way. They let the gale and the waves toss the ship wherever they will. When you battle such storms, Jim, you must find the courage to turn into the great waves. You must face the lightning and the thunder. You must stay in command of your ship to sail through to the other side. If you don’t, you’ll be blown to wherever the wind takes you. Some men have lived their entire lives lost for fear of turning into the storm. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jim said quietly. “I think so.” Jim waited another moment, to keep his voice from trembling. Then he said: “Captain Steele, what is the Treasure of the Ocean? Why is it that my father wanted me to have it so badly? Why does Count Cromier want it? And what did it do to his son?” Dread Steele took a deep breath. Any trace of the smile on his face faded away.

  “These are the more difficult questions, Jim. But perhaps it is left to me to answer them after all. Your father collected many treasures. He was a master of such things, even more so than myself. But the Treasure of the Ocean was his crowning achievement. The Treasure is but one piece of the vast horde you saw in the Pirate Vault of Treasures – a golden Trident.”

  Jim’s mind flashed to the box in his pocket – to the carved image upon the box’s lid. The image of a trident and a pearl. The clue had been in his grasp since the beginning, but he had not known it for what it was.

  “The Trident, which is the Treasure of the Ocean, is an ancient talisman of more powerful magic than any other on the face of the Earth. The one who wields it would hold sway over the very ocean itself – the winds, the clouds, the waves. Master over all of them he would be. Can you see now why the Cromiers must not possess it? As to why your father meant such a treasure to fall to you—”

  A single tone of a ringing bell drowned out Steele’s next words. The hairs on the back of Jim’s neck prickled. The ringing note clanged in Jim’s ears as loud as a church bell and scattered his thoughts. From the corner of his eye, he caught the briefest widening, like a hint of fear, passing through Dread Steele’s eyes. The Pirate Lord was also more than surprised at the bell’s alarm.

  Dread Steele slowly turned his head over his shoulder to where the strange bell hung from the hook on the corner of the captain’s desk. Jim and the Captain watched it for a long moment, holding their breaths. The bell hung silent and still long enough for Jim to hope that perhaps it had been nothing at all. He was about to risk saying so to the Captain, when he was interrupted by yet another echoing ring. After this second ring, Steele’s voice turned hard as stone.

  “Jim, go to the main deck. Find y
our friends there and take them below. Do not stop along the way or risk even tearing your eyes from the tops of your shoes. Below decks you will stay until MacGuffy or Cornelius comes to fetch you.”

  “Why?” Jim asked. Gooseflesh prickled up and down his arms and legs. “What’s happening?”

  “Do as I say, Jim!” Steele ordered with a growl, the bell gonging again as he spoke. “We are about come under attack.”

  “Attack? By who? The Cromiers? Splitbeard?” The bell was ringing over and over again, faster and faster, driving the terrified hammering of Jim’s pulse.

  “Not by who,” Steele growled. “By what.”

  EIGHTEEN

  im burst through the captain’s door and scrambled to the quarterdeck. He pushed past Murdock and Mufwalme and ran by Mister Gilley, who was holding fast at the wheel. He could still hear the mysterious bell ringing over and over again behind him. When he came upon George, Peter, Paul, and Lacey, they had already abandoned their buckets and brushes, and were peering over the portside railing. Their mouths hung agape and the color had drained from their faces.

  Jim was already too late.

  He leaned over the railing beside George and Lacey. His arms and legs went cold and numb. A black shadow spread like a stain in the waters beneath the Spectre, growing in all directions under the ship.

  “What is that, Jim?” George asked.

  “We should get below,” was all Jim could think to say. But before they had even a chance, a roaring fountain of water exploded beside the Spectre. Jim and the others fell back from the railing. Seawater rained down on their heads. A writhing monstrosity loomed above them and cast a dark shadow over the deck. The creature rose further and further into the air. It climbed as high as the mainmast and was thicker and stronger than a great tree trunk. Razor-sharp hooks glistened in a row along the length of the pale flesh. It was only then that Jim realized the enormity of the danger. The massive thing that now reared back to crush the Spectre was but one limb of a great beast beneath the waves.