The Eclective: The Haunted Collection Read online

The Haunted Collection

  The Eclective

  With stories by:

  Heather Marie Adkins

  Emma Jameson

  P.J. Jones

  Shéa MacLeod

  M. Edward McNally

  Alan Nayes

  R.G Porter

  Tara West

  Copyright © 2012 by the Eclective

  The eight authors in this collection retain and hold their individual respective rights to their stories.

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited.

  Cover Art by Tamra Westberry

  Interior Formatting by Heather Adkins|CyberWitch Press, LLC

  Visit the Eclective at eclectivebooks.com

  Table of Contents

  Empty Vessel by M Edward McNally

  The Smell of Death by Tara West

  Safe by Emma Jameson

  Cupcake Goddess: Soulfully Sweet by Shea MacLeod

  May I Go Play? by Heather Marie Adkins

  Blehdward, the Vampire Who Couldn’t Sparkle by PJ Jones

  Franscesca by Alan Nayes

  Soul Eaters by RG Porter

  Empty Vessel

  M. Edward McNally

  The name Wilhemanhe Maulaunahai was a brutal mouthful even for a native Miilarkian Islander, so a crewman only shouted “Cap’n Wil?” down the ladder into the dark hold to summon his commanding officer. Below decks, Wil sighed in the dark. This was his first run as the new, young captain of the Kaipo, and for years he had looked forward to hearing his proud, family name uttered respectfully by the men under him. It wasn’t going to happen. Wil had served in the merchant fleet of House Beyasha for more than twenty years, beginning as a cabin boy, and he knew most of the men of the ships as well as they did him. He was always going to be “Wil” to his crew, and he counted himself lucky when any of them remembered to add a quick “Cap’n” to his name.

  Wil moved through the darkness toward the shaft of sunlight shining down through a hatch. He had been trying to check the cargo to make sure all the barrels and casks remained secure, but was forced to do it all by feel as it was not safe to light a lantern below decks. The Kaipo was carrying grain between two Oswamban ports; hardly a glorious cargo, but one that could be dangerous as the dust and chaff seeping from rough containers could ignite when touched by an open flame. The air in the hold was as heavy as it was hot, and left a dirty taste in Wil’s mouth and even in his nose.

  At the base of the ladder, Wil peered up into the swarthy face of a crewman leaning over the open hatch, long braided hair hanging down like a bell-pull.

  “A ship, Cap’n,” the man called down. Wil waited for more, but there was none.

  “Would you care to be a bit more specific?” Wil had the urge to spit just to moisten his dry lips, but did not suppose that would accord with the dignity of an officer.

  “She looks to be a drifter, sirrah. We’ve gained on her for an hour and she’s just bobbing out there, sails down. Mr. Moke thought you’d want to get a gander as we pass.”

  Wil sighed. His second-in-command was an old hand with the full respect of the crew, who always referred to him as such. Mister Moke, sirrah.

  The captain ascended the ladder easily, for he was not so far removed from working in the rigging himself, scurrying up and down masts and across spars to tend the sails. One loose rung at the top rolled in Wil’s hand, as it had on the way down, and he directed the crewman to see it was caulked. The man replied that Mr. Moke had it on the list when the deck was reworked the next time the vessel reached port, as it was not prudent to fire up tar-pots with a hold full of grain. Wil mumbled “Mister Moke” to himself as he crossed the deck and ascended the stairway to the aftcastle. There his second-in-command and several crewmen were at the starboard gunwales, shielding their eyes against the bright sun to peer across the waves. The men’s backs were to Wil with matching braided tails of black hair hanging to their waists, Moke’s shot through with gray. This was Eleventhmonth, which would be the middle of the gentle winter in the Islanders’ native lands, but here across the belt of the world it was high summer, and unbearably hot off the golden coast of Oswamba visible to the south. Wil wore a somewhat ostentatious captain’s coat of olive green, the color of a peridot stone, and he fastened the elaborate lacings and brass buttons up his otherwise bare chest before clasping his hands behind his back and clearing his throat.

  Moke and the others turned to him, and while the men nodded politely Wil’s second only frowned. Miilarkians tended not to wear any sort of uniform while at sea, for they were a practical people. The men with Wil’s second included both Laban and Nui, the House Merchant and the Miisinian priest assigned to the Kaipo as chaplain, but all were alike outfitted only in cloth trousers and billowy cotton shirts, or even just open vests. Mr. Moke wore olive-green wristbands, but no other sign of rank. Only Captain Wil continued to wear his officer’s coat aboard, along with boots. The others went barefoot, or preferred sandals.

  “What is it, Mr. Moke?” Wil asked, having intended to drop the “Mister” but finding himself unable to do so. Keo Moke was a generation older than Wil, probably half a century in age, and he had been walking the decks of House Beyasha ships long before Wil was even a gleam in his mother’s eye, or however that expression went. It was common knowledge that following the old captain’s retirement, the House had first offered the captaincy of the Kaipo to the old salt, who for some reason or another had declined the honor. And so it had fallen to Wil, who himself had worked his way into the position of navigator over the years. He had always wanted to be a captain, but not expected to earn the position before the age of forty.

  “A corpse, sirrah,” Moke said, stepping away from the gunwale and extending a bare arm that looked like mahogany.

  Wil stepped to the rail to peer across the sea of light chop until discerning a vessel between the Kaipo and the distant shore, hard to spot at first for her boards were bleached to a faded gray that did not stand out against the golden-beige background. She looked to be a two-masted dhow; a style of ship with low sides and triangular sails common to coastal Oswamban waters, but unsuitable for deeper seas. The Kaipo was a deep-water caravel, with three masts and tall “castles” both fore and aft, and even from the distance Wil felt like he was looking down on the Oswamban ship.

  “She’s adrift?” Wil asked, squinting at the gray stranger. Moke gave a nod.

  “Looks to be. Note her wood, sirrah. She’s been out here a long time, for the Oswambans keep their hulls painted right pretty, they do.”

  “What is the point, then? She’s a dead ship and has been so for years.”

  Moke gave a snort through his wide nose and shot a look at two of the other men at the rails, the merchant Laban and Nui, the priest of Miisina, Goddess of Coin.

  “The ship seems to ride low in the water,” Laban said, the House merchant failing utterly to keep an eager gleam out of his eye. He was the sort of man who would chase a rolling copper piece into a sewer.

  “She is not low, she’s just short,” Moke muttered.

  “Yet her appearance before us may be a boon,” the chaplain intoned with a brilliant, white smile. “Miisina looks kindly on those bold enough to take her gifts.” Nui was the sort of man who would trip Laban to the ground in order to chase a rolling copper into a sewer himself.

  Wil looked between the two enthusiastic moneymen and gave a silent, inward sigh.

  “It is not good luck to board derelict vessels,” he said. “Ships tend to be abandoned for a reason.”

  “But this ship is so old,” Nui said. �
��Surely whatever happened to it was a very long time ago. Fortune favors the bold, as they say.”

  “They also say a wise man does not poke a sleeping panther,” Moke muttered.

  Wil glanced at his second, who gave him a stern and somehow fatherly look, and a single shake of his salt-and-pepper head. Wil felt his frown tighten, and though he’d had no intention of approaching the derelict ship; Laban, Nui, and the other crewmen nearby had all seen Mr. Moke give their captain clear direction.

  Cap’n Wil gave the order to shorten sails and come about.

  * * *

  Wil led five men aboard with him; Nui, two sailors and the two House Guilders along as protection for the merchant Laban. Laban decided not to board himself when the Kaipo was alongside the derelict and it became obvious the only way across was an awkward climb down a cargo net to the low deck of the dhow, rubbing against the Kaipo as both ships bobbed with the swell of the ocean. The priest Nui came along as he was still a young man for whom “boldness” left little room to negotiate.

  Wil very much enjoyed giving Moke command of the Kaipo, “Until I return,” but the quick look around the derelict was a different matter. The ship was indeed very old, with the planks of the deck already gone to warp and opening up gaps. There was not much cabin space and the hold was wide open. The others only moved to look about both areas after the two Guilders had checked them out over the burning matches of their short muskets.

  Nui led the sailors down into the hold while Wil looked quickly about the cabins. A Guilder had glanced into the rooms to insure no one was lurking in them, but the fellow had not looked much more carefully than that. In the largest room which must have belonged to the ship’s captain, Wil found remains.

  They were skeletal, piled strangely on the floor beneath an overhead beam which Wil peered at in the half-light shining through cracks between the plank walls. He opened the intact cover of a porthole, and the old wooden hinges both snapped when he yanked it open. In the light from outside Wil could just see a discoloration around the beam right above the bones, as though a rope once tied there had long since rotted away.

  “Hung yourself, did you Cap’n?” Wil asked, stretching out the toe of a boot to push at the bones, but stopping just short owing to a vague feeling of superstition. He put it aside to lean further over the bones, putting his face close to the dusty old skull that had landed on its back with the empty sockets staring straight up. Only scraps of leather clothing and a bit of rope remained intact, tented up by desiccated ribs and limbs.

  “Why did your crew leave you here, Captain?” Wil asked quietly, though there was no way to know if the man had been abandoned here by his men. The dhow’s lifeboats were gone, but they could have fallen empty into the sea when their rigging rotted away.

  Before Wil rose, the slight rocking of the vessel shone a shaft of light directly from the porthole onto the piled remains, and Wil frowned at a small spot of color amidst the dirty white and faded gray of bone and wood, which he lost sight of as the sunlight moved. Still feeling a bit uneasy, Wil reached down among the old bones and closed his fingers gingerly on some sort of knob, which to his surprise felt cool against the hardened pads of his digits. A shiver ran down his back despite the heat of the day, but Wil only frowned at himself. Miilarkian captains were not afraid of spook stories. He straightened and held up an object into the light.

  It was a very small statue, only as tall as his hand was long. It was of a standing figure of a man, ramrod straight and fists balled onto its hips, chin held high. It was of porcelain like some Far Western piece, and while it was too dusty to make out much detail it seemed to be finely made. Wil rubbed at its chest with a thumb, and stared at the familiar shade of olive green coloring the coat the figure wore so proudly.

  The priest Nui called the captain’s name, making Wil jerk where he stood. He collected himself and answered the man, who appeared in the cabin doorway to report with deep resignation that whatever had filled the vessel’s hold was rotted away to dry powder. Nui frowned at the bones at Wil’s feet but asked no question about the statue, for Wil had crammed it into a coat pocket before calling out to the man.

  They returned to the Kaipo, and the captain ordered his ship to proceed.

  * * *

  With ship’s business to oversee, Wil did not get to give the statue a closer examination until well after nightfall, with the derelict vessel left leagues behind their wake. He washed the figure off in a bucket in his quarters, and stared at it in candlelight, for his cabin was in the forecastle high above the dangerous air of the hold. Wil’s features assumed and maintained an almost comical expression of open-mouthed surprise.

  The figure was plainly that of a Miilarkian man. Wil could make out the braided hair hanging down the back of the figure’s coat, to which only the single spot of olive green paint he had first revealed clung stubbornly. The features of the face were obscure, not nearly detailed enough to hint at a national or racial identity, but the hairstyle and coat were a dead giveaway.

  It was not, Wil supposed, impossible for such an object to have wound up here, off the coast of Oswamba. Miilarkian vessels had only plied these waters for a few decades, since the first half of the 1200’s by the Norothian Calendar, but they had been trading with the Far Western lands where the statue had likely been made since late in the last century. It was not so hard to imagine that some Miilarkian captain, even one of House Beyasha, had commissioned the piece in the West, and later carried it into these waters. It was the sort of small object that made for a handy souvenir, and could easily have been given out or traded later with a fellow seafaring man, in command of his own ship. Captains exchanged such things regularly, and though the giving of gifts was not typical to the Miilarkian character, fitting in with local customs was.

  It was a strange coincidence to be sure, but not one Wil allowed himself to dwell upon for very long before he blew out the candle and settled down to sleep in his bunk. The night was unremarkable, but the morning brought a surprise. When Wil opened his eyes the first thing he saw was the porcelain figure on his desk. The whole coat was now, unmistakably, colored the olive green of the peridot stone that was the symbol of House Beyasha. The second thing Wil noticed was that the statue had changed posture. While one arm remained bent with a fist on one hip, the other arm extended into the air and held what appeared to be a very small tube, of the sort in which Miilarkian seamen carried messages.

  * * *

  For the morning and into the afternoon, Wil went about his duties in a state of distraction.

  There was plainly some sort of magic about the figure, and while Wil did not know any wizards or magi personally, as a cosmopolitan man of Miilark he was not unduly startled by sorcery. Nui, the Miisinian, was capable of invoking his own species of clerical spells to heal simple wounds or predict the weather a day or two ahead, and of course the ability of priests to purify saltwater both allowed Miilarkian traders to make long sea voyages without filling half their holds with freshwater, and insured that a priest was always present aboard far-ranging vessels. Magic, of a kind, had very much allowed the people of Miilark to become the world’s foremost trading nation. While it could be dangerous, it was not something to be feared. Not always.

  Wil considered speaking to Nui about the object he had taken from the derelict, but he knew the substance of any such conversation would pass almost instantly to the whole of the crew the very instant Wil was out of earshot. A Miilarkian captain did not garner respect by scurrying to the ship’s chaplain over every little thing. In early afternoon, Wil had made no decision either way, and the question mattered to him less after another ship’s sails were sighted to fore.

  Many local vessels had been seen with some regularity, for the trade lanes between the cities of Oswamba’s northern coast were busy. But the tall vessel ahead was clearly Miilarkian, and when she was close enough to see detail, the crew reacted with surprise to the green flag atop the mizzen mast that implied she was another Hou
se Beyasha vessel. A little closer, and that proved not to be the case. The flag of the approaching vessel was a brighter shade of green, typical of an emerald, meaning she was of the House of Deskata. As there was no animosity between the two Houses at the present time, the Island vessels shortened sails as they drew near for calls of greeting to be shouted from deck to deck. Mr. Moke of course shouted on behalf of Wil’s Kaipo, as the second-in-command had a strong, bellowing voice. To the surprise of everyone, except perhaps Wil himself who felt only a strange numbness, when the Kaipo identified herself by name to the Deskata vessel Asera, the Deskata men shouted back that they had a message aboard. A message for Captain Wilhemanhe Maulaunahai.

  It was not at all uncommon for Miilarkian vessels operating in the same foreign waters to carry messages from the home islands intended for each other, but such things were usually exchanged in port. There was no time for ships on opposite courses at sea to stop dead for a parley without fully dropping their sails and perhaps even anchoring, which would not have been possible at all this far off the coast. The Deskatas however moved swiftly, and even as the vessels passed each other, a man in a black Guild cloak stood at the rear of the Asera’s aftcastle with a bow drawn taut. Wil shouted for his crew to clear the Kaipo’s rear deck, and Moke waved for the Deskata Guilder to take his shot. The man did so, the arrow arcing high but flying poorly with a slim bone scroll tube bound to the shaft. Nevertheless, the Wind that was the luck of the Miilarkians was with Captain Wil that day, and the arrow flew true and thunked into the deck near the wheelhouse.

  The crewmen clapped each other on the shoulders for the Deskata archer’s prowess, and caps were waved as the vessels moved apart. Moke fetched the tube from the arrow fletched in emerald green feathers, and handed it over to his captain as Wil’s name was scratched onto the side, along with the name of his ship.

  By Captain’s Rights, Wil could have taken the missive to his own quarters and read it privately, but he was surrounded by a circle of curious faces. His heart was thumping in his chest, but he found he was not nervous, or at least not afraid. There had seemed something victorious in the posture of the statue on his desk that morning, with the message held up before it. Wil felt a strange confidence that there could only be good news within, and he broke the seal of olive-green wax to shake out a single sheet of rolled parchment as he stood on the deck. He read the few lines rapidly; the message was short as his wife must have written out a large number of identical missives to put aboard every ship heading south from the Islands a few months ago. Wil blinked at her familiar hand, and read her words over and over.