The silence that followed Dee Dee’s whisper was a physical weight, pressing down on them, heavier than the fog outside.

  She got him before he could find it.

  The words echoed in the small, cold lounge.

  A failed mission.

  A dead captain.

  Frankie looked from Dee Dee’s pale face, illuminated by the faint glow of her phone, to Damon, shivering violently on the floor. His teeth chattered, a sharp, rhythmic sound in the dead quiet. His skin, usually tanned and warm from the sun, was a waxy, bloodless gray. The life force that had been stolen from him had taken his color, his heat, his very presence. His eyes were open but saw nothing, staring at the grime-caked ceiling with a flat gaze.

  This was a stranger. This hollowed-out man wasn’t the surfer who had kissed her on the deck of the Sea Dawg yesterday, his laughter a warm, solid thing. He was a ghost already, and the sight of it ignited a cold, hard fury deep in Frankie’s gut. This was her fault. She was the one who couldn’t shake the feeling of wrongness, who had kept them out on the water. Now Damon was paying the price.

  “Then we finish what he started,” Frankie said. Her voice was quiet, stripped of emotion, but the words cut through the gloom with the sharp edge of a blade. “We find it.”

  As if in answer, a sound came from the other side of the barricaded door. Not a slam, but a slow, deliberate scrape. The sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor outside.

  Ted, who had been frozen by the door with his iron pipe, flinched. “What was that?” he whispered, his eyes wide.

  Another sound. A soft, wet thud against the wood. Then another. And another. Something was hitting the door, but it wasn’t trying to break it down. It was testing it. Probing.

  The barricade groaned as a steady pressure was applied. Wood splintered somewhere in the doorframe. The pile of furniture Dee Dee had stacked against it shifted, a chair leg scraping loudly across the floor.

  “They’re back,” Ted breathed, raising the pipe.

  The temperature in the room plummeted. It wasn’t a gradual chill, but an instantaneous drop, as if a freezer door had been thrown open. Frost, thick and white, bloomed in crystalline patterns across the dark glass of the portholes, obscuring the gray fog outside. Frankie’s breath plumed in front of her face in a thick cloud.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  And in the center of the room, a soft, ethereal blue light pooled on the floor. It didn’t cast shadows; it seemed to consume them, spreading like spilled water across the stained carpet.

  “Oh, come on…” Ted stumbled back from the door, his attention torn between the threat to and the new one forming within.

  The light grew brighter, coalescing. From its center, a translucent form took shape. A young girl, no older than thirteen, in a simple 1940s dress and saddle shoes, her dark hair pulled back with a ribbon. Her form flickered and warped at the edges, like a damaged film reel struggling to hold its image.

  Her eyes were wide. And filled with a sorrow so deep it was a physical force.

  “No way!” Ted’s pipe shook in his hands. “Get back! We’ve got iron, and we’re not afraid to… poke you with it!”

  “I am not one of them,” the ghost whispered. Her voice didn’t come from her mouth. It was everywhere and nowhere at once, a gentle, echoing sound inside their skulls. “I am not hers.”

  A loud slam against the door made them all jump. The table piled against it slid a few inches, its legs groaning in protest.

  “You know this… Vondra?” Frankie demanded, her grip tightening on the broken chandelier arm she held. She kept her body between the ghost and Damon.

  “Yes,” Camella whispered, her form flickering violently with the impact on the door. “A Soucouyant. She sheds her skin to hunt… becomes fire…”

  “The log said it could be destroyed,” Dee Dee said, her voice trembling as she clutched the captain’s book. “Salted and burned. Where is it? Where is the skin?”

  Another slam, louder this time, shook the entire room. A long, vertical crack appeared in the heavy wood of the door. The sound of hissing whispers seeped through it.

  “I don’t know!” Camella’s voice was thin, strained with effort. “She guards the secret. But the captain… in his final hours, he found a clue.”

  “Where?” Ted yelled, his eyes darting between the ghost and the splintering door.

  “His safe,” Camella said, her voice growing fainter. “On the bridge.”

  Frankie’s mind raced. The bellhop had been pointing up. Toward the top of the ship. It fit. “The other ghosts,” Frankie said, her eyes locked on Camella’s sorrowful face. “The captain. What are they?”

  “She corrupted them,” Camella whispered, her form fading at the edges as the hissing from outside grew louder. “He is her warden. Her strongest slave.”

  The door groaned, the heavy bolt straining in its housing under a terrible, steady pressure. It was no longer being hit; it was being pushed, relentlessly.

  “Where is the clue?” Frankie demanded, stepping closer to the fading light.

  A deep groan shook the door, splintering the wood around the bolt. It wouldn’t hold for much longer.

  “You must hurry,” Camella whispered, her form growing faint, almost transparent. “Vondra has corrupted the ship’s most powerful spirit to act as her warden. The Captain.”

  Her sorrowful eyes met Frankie’s, a silent plea passing between them.

  “To find the first clue to her skin’s location, you must get to his safe. You must go to the bridge.”

  She pointed a shimmering, transparent hand toward the ceiling, a path that led straight up, through the heart of the ship’s most haunted sections.