by Tom Slemen
'Aye captain,' Richardson replied with a half smile, 'I don't think he retired sir, as his bunk looks undisturbed.'
'Breakfast ready yet?' Briggs enquired. He heard a minute yawn, and turned to see it was little Sophia, turning in her own small specially-made bed in the corner. In the other bunk-bed, her mother slept with a serene expression.
'I'll go and see captain,' Richardson went off to the galley, where Edward Head was cooking a traditional meal of eggs ham and sausages.
Briggs put on a vest, shirt and waistcoat, and as he left his cabin to inhale the Atlantic's wintry morning air, he met the professor, who had mounted his telescopic box camera on a tripod. The lens at the end of the camera's cylindrical protrusion was aimed at the mist-ghosted islands in the distance. 'They are the Azores aren't they?' Orme asked Briggs, and he squinted at the rising sun.
Briggs nodded, and watched with disdain as Orme grappled with the camera and its sturdy brass tripod and moved down the deck towards the bow.
'Breakfast is being served soon!' Briggs shouted after the knowledgeable but fanatical eccentric.
Without turning, Orme shouted, 'Righto!' and he spread the legs of the tripod, lifted the black cloth attached to the box camera and put his head under it to look through the ground-glass viewfinder of the device. As Orme gently turned the cylinder on the box camera, the inverted image of the Azores came into pinpoint focus on the viewfinder's screen.
By noon, the islands of the Azores loomed brown and green oases in the warmer expanses of the eastern Atlantic. Captain Briggs scrawled the time and the longitude and latitude of the Mary Celeste's position in chalk on the ship's log slate, then picked up his sextant and went onto the deck to sight the sun with it.
'Ha!' Professor Orme's muffled exclamation from under the camera curtain attracted the amused attention of the Lorenzen Brothers, who were both leaning on the ship's port-side rail smoking their pipes, relaxing after reducing the ship's canvas for the Force 7 wind.
'What's the matter, Professor?' Volkert Lorenzen sneered, and alerted his brother by elbowing him gently in the ribs.
'No, Volkert,' Boz warned his brother with a whisper, 'don't talk to him, he's insane.'
'Captain! Captain! Come quickly!' the professor shouted from beneath the black curtain of the glorified camera obscura.
'What's wrong now?' Volkert walked over to the excited professor after giving a sarcastic sidelong glance to his brother.
Professor Orme lifted the camera's curtain and stared at Volkert with a look of horror. Then he pointed to the sea, and the German brothers gazed at the thing out there that the professor had directed their attention to.
Volkert looked into the choppy waters on the port-side of the vessel and saw that same strange creature he had seen yesterday. Again, it was riding on a dolphin's back, but this time it was less than one hundred yards away, and on this occasion, Volkert could see how hideous the thing was. It had a shark's glistening body; same first and second dorsal fins, same type of slit gills, tail and great jaws, but it also had hind legs like the legs of a man, only pale and shiny, and the creature also had withered-looking arms like those of a Tyrannosaurus Rex dinosaur. Volkert estimated that the monster's height was about five feet or more.
'Tell the captain,' Orme said to Volkert, who seemed to be entranced at the sight of the weird horror. 'Tell the captain!' yelled Orme.
Volkert turned to face the professor with a look of intense fear in his sky-blue eyes. 'What is it?' he asked in a faint voice.
Boz ran to the stern of the ship, where Captain Briggs was calibrating his sextant.
'What's the professor shouting about?' Briggs asked.
'Captain, come quickly! That horrible animal is back!' the German sailor shouted hysterically, before running back to the bow.
The captain followed him, and thus time he too saw the thing.
The dolphin was circling the ship in a clockwise direction. Arian Martens and the First Mate came on deck after hearing the heavy running footsteps of Boz Lorenzen across the deck. The Second Mate and Mrs Briggs also came up to see what was happening. Sophia Briggs meanwhile, remained in the captain's cabin, playing with her toys, oblivious to the turmoil.
The captain's wife screamed when she spotted the unknown aquatic beast that was now in rather close proximity to the ship in the waters on the starboard side. 'Oh! What is it?' she gasped, and clung on to her husband's arm feeling faint.
'I don't know,' Briggs told her, and he watched as the creature dismounted the dolphin to dive into the waves so that only its fin was visible, slicing through the waters – towards the ship.
'It's coming towards us Captain,' said Richardson in a sombre low voice. He was experiencing palpitations but put on a brave face.
'Go to my cabin and stay there with Sophia!' Briggs told his wife. 'And bolt the door!' he added.
Sarah Briggs lifted the hem of her long black skirt a couple of inches from the floorboards of the deck and ran to the cabin.
'Captain, I have a gun,' said Volkert Lorenzen. He never thought he'd disclose this unsavoury fact to the captain, but he had never known fear like this.
'Fetch it, quickly!' said Briggs, flatly.
Volkert raced to the hatchway and quickly descended the steps to the lower deck.
'Fetch an axe, Richardson,' Briggs told the First Mate.
'Yes captain!' Richardson was about to run to the hatchway to get the ship's axe when Boz Lorenzen, who was leaning over the ship's rail, suddenly let out a shriek that stopped Richardson in his tracks.
'It's trying to get aboard, captain!' Boz looked down at the creature and watched in complete terror as it tried to claw its way up the ship's hull.
Briggs, the professor, and the Second Mate all leaned gingerly over the ship's rail, and saw that the grotesque amphibian was indeed scaling the hull by inserting the hooked tips of the sharp talons in its feet and hands into the minute gaps between each of the hull's planks.
Volkert returned with a revolver. He came bounding down the deck and offered the firearm to the captain, but Briggs had never fired a gun in his life, and so he implored Volkert to blast the monster boarding the Mary Celeste. The German looked over the ship's rail and took aim at the grotesque denizen of the deep. He discharged a round, blasting a neat hole in the left side of the creature's torso. A stream of black blood spurted from the wound, and the creature screwed its black button eyes and and made a pathetic whining noise.
Volkert was about to fire the rest of the rounds into the shark-man hybrid, when Professor Orme suddenly rushed to his side and tried to wrestle the gun from the German.
'No! Don't do it man! In the name of science!' Professor Orme managed to twist the seaman's wrist with considerable violence, and the Volkert cried out and let go of the revolver. Briggs tried to catch the weapon as it left Volkert's hand, but it bounced off the captain's reaching palm and fell into the waters.
'You damned idiot!' Briggs raised his hand and almost brought it down on the face of the cowering professor. Volkert rubbed his aching wrist once before he threw a wild punch at the professor that narrowly missed him.
'Enough!' Briggs shouted, and he stood between the professor and Volkert.
There was a splash below as the wounded bipedal shark fell into the sea.
Albert Richardson came to the rail with an axe and saw the creature's tail disappear below the foamy waves. The cook and Arian Martens, who had heard the gunshot, accompanied him.
'Spread out and keep watch along the sides of the ship,' the captain told his crew.
The Lorenzen brothers watched from the stern, First Mate Richardson watched from the port-side, ready with an axe, and Second Mate Gilling watched the starboard side. The captain told Martens to watch the waters around the bow, then ordered the cook to return to the galley without telling him about the creature.
Fifteen minutes later, the finned fiend made a second attempt to board the ship, and this time it was successful. It managed to climb up the
ropes of the bowsprit that hung just above the waterline. Arian Martens backed away from the creature as it crawled onto the bow. The gunshot wound in its torso had already closed up. Martens let out a cry for help that sent the rest of the crew running to him. Richardson advanced with the axe held threateningly above his head by both trembling arms. The creature looked at the huddled men and opened its mouth to reveal two arcs of triangular razor-sharp teeth. It made a peculiar snorting sound and seawater dripped from its mouth onto the deck. It stood there stock-still and made no attempt to move, and Richardson rapidly discovered he was a coward. He just didn't have the nerve to whack the animal with the axe blade.
The other backed away towards the stern, leaving the First Mate to challenge the creature alone.
Perspiration streamed down Richardson's forehead and the sharp sea-wind blew the sweat into his eyes. The demonic walking shark inched forward with its lifeless onyx disc eyes fixed upon Richardson. 'We should go to his help!' Boz Lorenzen suggested, but no one responded, and the creature's eyes swivelled towards the gaggle of retreating men. In one heart-stopping moment, Richardson lurched forward and brought the axe down on the creature's head, but not with as much force as he'd intended, for his arms seemed to respond in slow-motion because of the sheer fear in his stomach. All the same, the blade of the axe embedded itself in the animal's grey shiny skin with a squelchy thud. The black blood from the wound sprayed all over Richardson, and the monster screamed, throwing its head back, revealing the hideous rows of teeth. Richardson let go of the axe handle and left the tool in the creature's head. The shark-man's feeble claw-like hands tried desperately to reach up to the axe handle, but its arms were simply too short, and so the axe remained stuck in its head.
Richardson turned and started to run towards the rest of the crew in a state of shock.His face was covered in the animal's inky blood. The nightmarish marine creature ran screaming at an amazing speed after the First Mate and bounded on him, knocking him to the ground. It opened its huge jaws and bit into his back. The captain and crew members looked on, transfixed by the sheer horror of the creature's ferocious attack. Richardson coughed out a quantity of bright red oxygenated blood from his shredded lungs, screamed once, and then reached out with both arms towards the traumatised captain and crewmen. Richardson's eyes bulged in terror, contrasted against his face, which was black with the spattered blood of the weird hybrid. The shark's eyes rolled backwards in a reflex action as it shook Richardson from side to side, tearing off his shoulder blades before munching loudly on his kidneys and slithery colon. Then it kept the spasm-ridden body of the First Mate steady with its foot as its jaws tore off Richardson's head. The devil then cracked the head in its jaws, and pink brain matter spurted out. The unclassified predator suddenly advanced slowly towards Briggs and his men. Shreds of Richardson's blood-soaked clothes and strips of his flesh and viscera hung from the open jaws of the beast, and yet all Professor Orme said, perhaps because he was suffering from severe shock, was 'Ha! He has a ribcage, unlike the regular sharks.'
'You idiot,' Briggs said to Orme, 'this is all your fault. We should throw you to that thing!'
Orme seemed oblivious to the captain's words, and suddenly announced: 'I must record this! Keep him occupied while I fetch the camera!' and the professor ran across the deck to the starboard side and ran down to the bow, where his camera still stood on its tripod. The carnivore momentarily halted its slow advance to watch Orme's antics. It watched Orme carry the tripod and camera to a new vantage point on the starboard side of the deck where he trained the telescopic tube of the camera upon the bloodthirsty biped. Orme put his head under the little black curtain, and after focusing on his subject, he exposed the photosensitive plate for two seconds.
The embedded axe was aggravating the flesh-eating biped. It shook its head from side to side in a screaming frenzy, and managed to shake the axe loose. The axe flew across the deck towards Briggs, and the captain crouched to pick it up swiftly – but the creature charged at him. The four crew members standing around the captain scattered over to the starboard deck in their retreat from the creature.
Briggs whispered to his God, asking for courage. He ran forward to meet the abomination head on, and the unbelievable occurred. Briggs slammed the blood-smeared blade of the axe into the nose-tip of the creature, and it fell to the ground with a thud, unconscious. Like a normal shark, the hybrid mammal's vulnerable nerve point was also in its nose.
The captain stood there, looking down at the bleeding creature before him. His heart pounded heavily, and he felt his own blood coursing through the carotid arteries of his neck as he thought about the terrible death suffered by Arian Martens. Fearing the animal would regain consciousness, Briggs started to lash out at the sea demon. With each bloody axe blow he became more enraged. The Lorenzen brothers eventually grabbed the axe from the captain and led him from the mutilated creature to his cabin. Where Mrs Briggs was trying to calm her hysterical daughter.
'We must preserve parts of this specimen!' Professor Orme announced. He bent down and surveyed the twitching shark-man's corpse. He had an idea. The Mary Celeste was carrying a cargo of denatured alcohol, the ideal substance for preserving organic tissue. The professor went down to the cargo hold and inspected the barrels by the light of an oil lamp. He found a crowbar, wrenched the lid of a barrel, and the sharp sweet smell of the crude alcohol greeted his nostrils. 'Capital!' he exclaimed, before going up to the deck to dismember the dead creature's body. He used the axe to chop off one of the withered arms of his prize specimen.
'What are you doing?' Boz Lorenzen queried the professor's gruesome intentions.
'Obtaining evidence for the damned sceptics of the Royal Society – that is what I am doing.' Orme casually offered the chopped-off arm to the seaman. 'Here,' he told Boz, 'put that in the opened barrel in the hold – quickly.'
Boz recoiled from the offered limb and felt nauseous. He shook his head and backed away. 'You're insane.'
'Now listen here Boz,' Orme was saying when the ship shook – as if it had run aground. The tremendous jolt threw Orme face-first into the blood-spattered corpse of the sea creature.
Boz Lorenzen turned and froze with terror. Another sea creature had come onto the deck, and it was identical to the one that had attacked the crew earlier, only this animal was about twenty feet in height – and in addition to the terrible jaws it possessed, the thing had a long sharp nose like the lance of a swordfish. It's small arms lashed about at the rigging that obstructed its advance towards the butchered remains of its only son. The ship swayed as if it were ready to capsize when the leviathan pounded the deck with its huge webbed feet. The professor's tripod-mounted camera toppled overboard as the ship rocked.
The captain emerged from his cabin, and as soon as he saw the monster towering over him, he knew the end was near, but still, he had to try and get his wife and child off the ship, and so he ordered the crew to man the longboat at the stern of the vessel.
The cook was the first victim of the gigantic creature. He came onto deck and almost fainted with fear when he saw the prehistoric-looking hybrid towering over him. The thing bent down and its claw picked the cook up from the deck. After scrutinising the screaming and wriggling prey, the creature eased him into its gaping mouth and chewed his legs and lower abdomen until he made stopped making any sound or movement. A rain of the cook's blood fell onto Boz Lorenzen, whose legs had become paralysed with fear. He intended to run but the weakness of his legs caused him to stumble towards the rail. He saw the giant head with its colossal jaws swooping down upon him, and so Boz threw himself over the rail and into the sea. The current pulled him under the ship, where he tried to hold his precious breath, but he opened his mouth, gasping for air, and the seawater filled his lungs. Drowning his a terrible way to die, but the others on the Mary Celeste were to suffer a worst death than Boz Lorenzen.
The longboat was launched in sheer panic. The creature dived from the ship and the huge wave it created capsized
the longboat. Captain Briggs surfaced first and looked about. He couldn't see his wife or daughter, just the raised arms of the professor thrashing about. The longboat suddenly splintered as the large horned head of the sea monster came through it. In the creature's mouth was the twitching body of Mrs Brigg's, minus a head. Embraced in the arms of the corpse was Sophie, looking as if she was asleep. She'd died from traumatic shock.
Briggs fainted at the sight and slipped into oblivion beneath the waves of the eternal Atlantic.
The abandoned Mary Celeste drifted on through the red waters.
Matthew found himself back in his bedroom, but for a few moments he could hear the rush of the Atlantic waves, and the gulls of the Azores shrieking as they swooped onto the deck of the Mary Celeste to scoff on the remains of the slaughtered offspring of the giant sea monster. A razor-edged breeze stung Matthew's eyes and flicked through the pages of the school exercise book on his computer desk. Christina's lips were smeared with blood, and in her mouth she tasted a salty vileness. She had been the giant sea monster who had eaten man woman and child on the ship of the damned...
The teenaged Goth rushed out of the room holding her hand across her mouth, ready to throw up. She bolted across the landing, tried several doors in her search for the toilet, and when she found the toilet, she knelt before the basin, and was violently sick. Matthew came into the toilet out of a natural concern for his girlfriend and asked her if she was okay. She shook her head and flushed the toilet. A single eyeball with a grey-blue iris remained in the water of the basin, bobbing about. Christina got to her feet and backed away, gazing down into the basin with a look of horror.
'Hey! What's going on in there?' Matthew's father said, standing outside the toilet. He rapped on the toilet door when there was no answer. 'Matthew?'
'She's sinister,' Christina told Matthew, and started to cry. 'I ate those people; she turned me into a monster.'
'She puts us in all the stories Christina,' Matthew told his first real love, 'it's just her way.'