And that was where the problem arose.
They were currently standing in a sort of stairwell with two doors leading on to the landing and stairs stretching away upwards and downwards (with a couple of brass octopuses on the banisters). Lex had come from one of the doors and Jeremiah had come from the other. For some reason, Lex had expected Jeremiah to walk straight past him and back the way Lex had just come but it seemed that he, like Lex, didn’t think there was much point in exploring parts of the ship that another player had already investigated. They therefore both went to go up the stairs at the same time.
‘Find your own route!’ Lex said.
‘You find your own route!’ Jeremiah snapped.
‘Look, let’s be sensible about this. Why don’t we both take the stairs but you go down and I go up?’
Whilst Jeremiah and Lex bickered, Jesse held the crisp packet out to Tess. The little girl reached out to take one but then froze suddenly and shook her head, pointing at the Binding Bracelet on her wrist. Jesse shook his own head, impatient with himself for forgetting again. But then he thought of chewing tobacco and he motioned with his hand for Tess to watch. He took a crisp out of the packet, put it in his mouth, sucked the flavour out of it, and then spat the soggy crisp out on to the floor. No body swap. A big grin spread across Tess’s face and she reached for a crisp to do the same.
‘I’m not going down!’ Jeremiah was saying vehemently. ‘There are probably more flesh-eating crabs down there!’
So that was what had taken a chunk out of Jeremiah’s leg. Lex bet those crabs were nowhere near as horrible as the Squealing Blue-Ringed Octopii of Scurlyshoo, though.
‘I’m going up these stairs,’ Jeremiah declared. ‘And that’s that. I would strongly advise you not to get in my way.’
So it was to come down to a race between them, then. Lex decided his best chance would simply be to leg it up the stairs as fast as he could. Jesse could follow in his own time? he was a grown man who could take care of himself. Tess, on the other hand, was a little girl and Jeremiah would have to be even more of a jerk than Lex thought to leave her by herself on this terrible ship.
But just as his whole body was tensed ready to flee, something happened that made them all freeze. There was music coming from above. It was some sort of old sea shanty played on a harmonica. The music was out of place down there on the sunken ship? an oddly lonely sound? a sort of distant echo of the long-gone sailors who had once sailed her.
And that was when Lex first realised that, so far, they had not seen a single skeleton. Where were the crew? Even if the flesh-eating crabs had stripped the bodies bare, they surely wouldn’t have eaten the bones as well. There should be skeletons at the very least. Skeletons all over the place, in fact.
‘It must be Lorella playing some trick,’ Jeremiah said firmly as Tess drew fearfully closer to his side, clearly unnerved by the eerie music. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts.’
Despite this statement, it was clear from the way he looked longingly at the stairs that Jeremiah would now prefer to go down rather than up. Like an amateur, he thought it was better to avoid the obstacles rather than head straight for them. But as Lex was clearly still intending to go upstairs, Jeremiah decided that he’d better, too. They proceeded as a cautious group, for Lex now felt unable to stick to his original plan of legging it up there. Deliberately going towards danger was all very well but running towards it blindly was just plain stupid.
They got closer and closer to the melancholy music until they finally reached the little landing on the floor above and found the cause. A sailor sat there on the banisters with a harmonica in his hand, which he lowered when he saw them coming. They all stared at each other for a minute. The sailor didn’t look like a ghost. Or, at least, he didn’t look the way Lex had always imagined a ghost to look, in that he wasn’t a floating sheet with a couple of eye holes or, failing that, at least transparent. But he didn’t look quite normal either. His skin had a strange greyish look, his eyes were sunken, his hair dry.
‘What are you, sir?’ Jeremiah demanded, pointing his sword at the sailor in an over-dramatic, threatening manner. ‘Speak up! Are you a ghost?’
The sailor looked at him in cold silence for a moment before saying, ‘We’re not dead. We’re a cursed crew. We’re not allowed to die.’ His voice was dry and hoarse, like he never used it. Something about the tone sent shivers up Lex’s spine.
‘Someone on board pissed off the Gods, did they?’ he asked.
The sailor fixed his baleful gaze on him. ‘Aye,’ he whispered, before shuddering and falling silent. It seemed that whatever the crew had done to get themselves cursed in such a way was not a story this man wanted to dwell upon. Which suited Lex just fine, for he couldn’t have cared less.
‘Stand aside and let me pass!’ Jeremiah demanded.
‘No one is stopping you,’ the sailor replied coldly.
Jeremiah looked at him suspiciously for a moment before edging past him cautiously with Tess. It was as if he expected the sailor to suddenly attack him. Lex made a show of looking suitably wary and suspicious? as if he was allowing his competitor to go first to make sure it was safe. But the truth was that, unless someone was coming at him with a sword or a mace of some kind, Lex was prepared to cautiously consider them safe for the time being? and thus, potential sources of extremely valuable information.
Once they were past the sailor, Jeremiah grabbed Tess’s hand and raced up the stairs. Lex’s lip curled with contempt and he shook his head. What an amateur! The truth was that Lex had no intention of running up the stairs now. He simply wanted Jeremiah out of the way. It seemed that it had not yet occurred to him that, if the crew were all cursed rather than dead, then the captain would be moving around. He could be anywhere on the ship and running about looking for him blindly was not going to get the job done. Lex could hardly believe that Jeremiah had just gone off like that, leaving this rich source of information for Lex to tap alone. Even if this sailor didn’t know exactly where the captain was, he should at least know a little more about the potential dangers on board the ship. There was certainly nothing to lose by just asking nicely.
‘What are those rings on your hand?’ Lex asked, momentarily distracted. They looked horribly familiar and so he was fairly sure that he already knew the answer.
‘The octopuses,’ the sailor replied. ‘We were here before them so they don’t seem to mind us most of the time. But sometimes they bite. Because we’re already half dead, they can’t kill us. But they leave these scars.’ He held up his hand to display the pale, white rings. ‘And it hurts like you wouldn’t believe. Like something has got inside your body and is ripping up your insides. A bite from one of the Blue-Ringed Octopii will stop a live man’s heart in under a minute.’ He added in a sad voice, ‘But our hearts stopped long ago so they present no danger to us.’
‘I don’t suppose you know where the captain is, do you?’ Lex asked.
‘He spends most of his time up on deck.’
‘Up on deck?’ Lex repeated, his heart sinking. ‘You mean… out there?’ He pointed towards a dark porthole, the black ocean pressing against it in an unnerving manner.
‘Yes.’ The sailor nodded. ‘He wanders the deck. Most of them do.’
Well, that could certainly be a problem. For whilst the cursed crew might not need to breathe, Lex did. In the past he could have magicked himself up there but he no longer had that option? not since Lucius had burnt all his magical enchanted hats, blast him. Lex made it a habit to always carry one of the little mini-hats he used for calling cards as the Wizard in his pocket (you never know when the chance might arise to pinch something), but all they were good for was lighting pipes. They couldn’t help him breathe under water. Indeed, now that he thought about it, Kala hadn’t actually mentioned what was supposed to happen when someone finally found the captain’s medallion. She wanted it returned to her but there was no easy way for a human to reach the surface of the sea unaided and Lex could only hope that the Gods would pull them out of there the same way they’d sent them down.