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One day you wake up and your eyes are sewn shut.
There’s a bottle of rum in your hand, some feeling of dirtied, soiled sheets wrapped around your legs, the absolute shit beat out of your head and your stomach and your heart. The bottle is empty. And you still cannot open your eyes.
And that’s a blessing.
At least at first it is, because you think at least this way, the tears will no longer come. Except they still do. It’s fucking unfair. But you’ve always known that. That life is fucking unfair.
So you spend the greater part of twenty minutes trying to pry your eyes open, and yes there are more tears, and maybe a little blood and kohl mixed in there, you don’t know. You aren’t sure. You are just trying to see.
You need to see if it’s still there.
The freak in the window.
No, not your own reflection, pathetic and grotesque as it is, a stupid attempt at a menacing look resulting in black smears down your cheeks. No one has called you a freak to your face, of course, but that’s because you don’t see anyone anymore. They don’t want to see you, and you don’t want to see them, and you can’t see them because your eyes have been threaded together, and you’re smart enough not to skip leg day but nobody told you that eyelid day was a thing, so you’re straining your lids against the threads holding them together, and you’re laughing this, frankly, insane laugh because those fucking eyelids are the only thing you have held together these days.
Eventually there are little snaps and a few little squirts of blood and you’re rubbing your eyes, and the blood makes the kohl sticky and the kohl turns the blood black.
And you think to yourself, well this is fucking scary. I look scary as fuck right now.
And you gaze over to the other side of the cabin, and realize that even so, you are only the second scariest thing in this room right now.
Because it’s still huddled there.
A man-sized heap of a thing, bundled in a sullied red bird-flecked robe, boneless and bunched in a fetal position on its side. A veritable mess of golden, curly hair juts out from the top of its head which barely pokes out from the fabric.
And it has no face. It’s a blank face, an empty face, made of some sort of knit fabric, like the fabric of a stocking, and it is just laying there in a bundle under the window. It is looking right at you. You don’t think it’s moved since you first saw it last night, glints of moonlight bringing out the stark white of its stupid puppet head.
You think it might be a joke. Maybe. A cruel joke to play, but maybe one you deserve? After all of this? You think that joke or no, you deserve it, to have it there. That lump of a thing.
You should probably go up to it and prod it with a stick, or your foot. Maybe there’s a body in there, a stocking pulled over its face. Maybe it’s a hallucination, maybe you’re going crazy.
You don’t go over there though, you don’t even get fucking near it. You take a swig of your rum and stagger over to a mirror to gawk at the second-biggest freak on this cursed fucking ship. You poke and prod your cheeks to mix around the blood and the kohl, like to make a design or something, because while it’s fine to look deranged you also need to look scary because that is the only thing holding the whole pathetic mess together. The fear.
There is a lot of fucking fear around these days.
When you’re satisfied, you exit the cabin, and you don’t spare a single glance at that straw-haired puppet crumpled under the window, because it doesn’t mean anything to you.
When you return later, rum in hand, you pretend not to notice that its blank, empty face is now fixated on the door.
The next day you wake up and laugh, but it’s an ugly sort of muffled laugh because this time, it’s your mouth. Your mouth won’t open. Can’t open. How the fuck did they manage that? Is there something in the rum? You aren’t about to stop drinking it, though, but maybe you’ll have to if you can’t unsew your fucking mouth. So you strain against the threads for a minute, chuckling and gasping.
Then you reach under the pillow for the knife and this time you can cut it open, you cut the threads one at a time, and if you whimper a little bit at the pain there’s no one to hear it. Nobody is coming down here.
No one but the fucking puppet under the window. Its blank face is still fixed on the door. Whoever is fucking with your orifices doesn’t fuck with faceless freaks, you suppose. Can’t blame them. It’s messed up.
This time, when you go for the mirror, licking your lips to feel the salt of the blood mixed with a tangy sweetness, honey? Was this rum, or mead? You stop in front of it. Just a foot and a half away. Two feet.
You don’t know who found the robe. You don’t know who made this fake head, with this fake blond hair sticking from the white stocking. You do know that they’re fucking dead, if you find them. They don’t get to touch your stuff.
You don’t pick it up though, you don’t touch it. Let it stay there, let it rot. It doesn’t scare you. You’re fearless as fuck. It should be scared of you.
You aren’t even weirded out later on, when Izzy enters and limps right fucking past it like it isn’t even there. You really aren’t terrified, not at all, when the asshole decides to leave, and you heave a sigh, and rub your stinging, sticky eyes with one hand, and you can swear its head has twisted back to its original position, fixated on his bed. Your. Your bed.
It is several days later, and you are a decrepit room-goblin hunched under the covers. You let your eyes peek out of course, have to be on the look out, and you stare straight ahead, or at the ceiling, or out the window, anywhere but the other side of the cabin. Anywhere but there.
You never remember closing your eyes, not anymore, only the waking. Only the sharp pain around your neck of a slowly-growing tattoo, dots and lines and circles forming an integumentary choker, the mark of a dead man. A hanged man. Every time you wake, it is something new, some sort of fuckery meant to… well, you don’t know what. Sometimes they remove your tongue, only to put it back the following night (assholes). Other times they swap around your tattoos, your ships become flowers and your stars become insects. And you want to know which member of your fucking crew knows how to do that, how to work this freaky fucking tattoo magic, but you won’t because you will never get close to your crew again. Ever.
Whoever it is, they are doing everything they can to fuck with you, but you don’t say anything at all. You are Blackbeard. You are in control. Always.
On the other side of the cabin, in the spot you dare not to look, is the ghoul. The freak. The dummy. The sinister man-like yet formless malevolent puppet is sitting up now, its head floating two feet off the floor, and you don’t know what kind of leverage is under that robe to make that happen. It is limbless, or at least the seemingly endless fabric of the robe hides whatever is there. If you weren’t the scourge of the whatever number of seas, it would creep you out for sure. Especially since the head is turned towards you, as of this morning.
It isn’t a head though, is it? It’s a freakishly light-weight cannonball, or a watermelon. It has a stocking over it, is all. A practical joke. Your crew is full of jokers.
Your life is full of fucking traitors. And liars.
You want to stride up to it, ask it what the fuck its deal is, kick it, grab it with your bare hands and shake it. But you won’t. You know you can’t. You can’t get too close to it, but you can’t get rid of it either.
Once you had the audacity to walk away, to be someone new, become someone else. But that’s been stripped of you. You are naked and vulnerable, even if nobody outside the cabin knows it. Not yet.
So you push yourself out of bed and close the curtains, all of the curtains you can find, because the room needs to be darker, dark enough so you can’t see. Dark enough so you’re able to pretend. Dark enough to hide yourself away.
As the curtains close and the cabin plunges into blackness, you can swear that you smell smoke. You close your eyes and the sensation disappears.
Your days are filled with smoke, and your nights are missing entirely.
Absolute silence fills the cabin, deep dread, desolate desperation. You haven’t seen the sun in days. You don’t want to see the sun, the sun that reminds you of what you lost, of what you were deluded into believing you could have. You don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve to leave.
You picture his soft skin, smooth and blemish-free, his pale neck as he removes his cravat. The one that’s around your neck, right now. It covers the stupid fucking markings that keep appearing there, the rope burns and the bruising. You think the cravat had maybe protected him once, maybe. But he isn’t here now. It’s just a bit of fabric. It means nothing.
Still, you imagine the sun reaching through the black curtains on the window and touching you, caressing your back like a tender lover. You’ve never had one of those, but you can imagine it. You can pretend. You can always pretend.
Just like you’ve been pretending that the puppet doesn’t have eyes now, that there aren’t two red flames glowing like embers upon a canvas of white.
Its eyes don’t fucking glow. They don’t. They do not.
It’s been you don’t know how many fucking days now. And you can admit that you are at your limit. There is smoke billowing under every door, through every fucking crevice, and when you command them to find the source, to put it out, to do their fucking job or you’ll start removing limbs, they scramble around and search and search and search but never find it. Fucking useless. Even Izzy. Izzy can’t find the source, but that’s probably because he’s too fucking slow, limping around and around and yelling and delegating but is he doing? No.
And you get to thinking. There’s a lot to think about, you see. You get to thinking as the piercing red lights glow through the darkness when you’re just trying to fucking sleep, but you can’t because you have this stupid haunted doll that is moving about, that is rustling around in the dark like a stupid stuffed asshole, and sometimes you wake up and the eyes are on the ceiling staring down at you, and sometimes they’re peeking over the edge of the bed, and through it all you are not scared you are not losing your mind you are not afraid because it’s just a prank or you are going insane and either way you are not in any fucking danger.
So you, you, you get to thinking, you know that saying where there’s smoke, there’s fire?
Maybe this stupid thing is just asking for some fire.
And you wake up once again in the middle of the night with your mouth open in a scream, not in fear but in pain, because there are burning hot embers on your chest, someone left them there just for you, and you grab them and throw them across the room. And now your hands are burning too. And it just isn’t fucking fair at all.
So you grab your little tinderbox, the one every pirate has (you have a knife you have a gun you have a knife you have a gun) you grab the tinderbox and another half-empty bottle of rum, and you approach it. The puppet. It’s laying there all innocent under one of the windows, where he used to keep all his brandy.
And you aren’t going to touch the fucking freak on the floor, all lumpy and boneless like a sinister pile of laundry, so you pour the rum all over it because fuck this thing, you don’t need to touch it, you just need to pour. You just need the flint and the steel. You just need a few sparks, that’s all.
The freak goes up in flames, surprisingly quickly, like it was made of kindling and wood, like a little wooden boy on fire. And you just stand there and watch as the flames burn around you. It doesn’t matter, this thing has to go. You have shit to do, you can’t deal with it anymore.
And at some point the flames turn to smoke, black smoke, and all you can see is a red velvet robe blackened with smog. Mission accomplished, should have done that the first time.
You lurch over to the mirror to check, to see how scary you look, to make sure the mix of kohl and blood and tears will elicit terror instead of pity this time. But then you make the mistake of blinking, and there it is in the reflection behind you.
The stupid fucking puppet, hanging by its neck from the ceiling, smoke pouring from the top of its head, face expressionless except for those two burning embers.
You whirl around with a shout, because you’ll set it on fire again if you have to. But there’s nothing there.
There’s nothing anywhere. The puppet is gone. But the robe is there, still in a lump on the floor, still covered in soot and ash.
You pick the robe up and put it on. It’s yours. No one else can have it.
You are not alone.
Well, you are alone, in all the ways that matter. So, completely, utterly alone. You have no one.
But there’s something in here with you, not some stupid bundle of rags with a stupid head and stupid glowing eyes. Some other thing. Something that makes noises. Something that has a presence.
And you think to yourself, if you’re going to be alone, if you’re really going to embrace the room-goblin aesthetic, you should rid yourself of whatever this is. You have your gun, you have your knife, you have your tinderbox. You can’t sleep, won’t sleep, because next you’ll wake up with your fingers sewed together or your dick missing or your hair shaved or your eyes will turn all hazel and you can’t deal with that. So you go hunting.
The first thing you check is the wardrobe. The main one, not the stupid auxiliary one. Not the one that still holds the last vestiges of your soul, the small spackling of hope that still clings to your canvas like flecks of paint. No, the normal wardrobe, the one everyone can see, the one you can point to and say, this is yours. This is your ship and on your ship, there is a wardrobe, and you own it. It belongs to you. It is yours. And you grab the handle, your fucking handle, not his fucking handle any more but yours.
So you open the door, but there is no swoosh of a spooky gentlemanly ghost to wail at you, or an enemy tucked inside to toss a knife at your throat, or a small, pathetic child with dark hair and eyes who has been hiding there ever since his mother ushered him in and walked away.
The wardrobe is empty.
Next you check the fancy gentleman head, the room with the bath, and you look all around the damn thing and briefly think that you could use one yourself, because you’re covered in weeks of blood and grime and dirt. But you shy away from it, because it isn’t for you, but you tell yourself it’s because you don’t want to get naked with some sort of pervert ghost hovering around. So you move on.
You search the whole damn ship, well, almost the whole damn thing, there’s still that one room you don’t want to enter, and everything is telling you that you find lost shit in the last place you look, and if you make that room the last place you look then of course it will be there. But you can’t help it. You stagger about, yelling for the ghost, yelling for it to come out and find you, come out and fight (come out and be your friend), come out and die.
Crew members dart and dodge out of your way. Some are brave enough to tell you that there is no ghost at all. That it’s all in your head.
But still, you can hear it. It’s in the walls, the ceiling, up on deck, deep in the bowels of the ship. This is a broken ship, a haunted ship. But, you’ve got to wonder, if not a ghost, what exactly is doing the haunting? Is there a spirit in the walls, or is there in truth an ugly, shriveled ghoul in the captain’s cabin, just wasting away like a lonely fucking idiot who has completely lost the plot?
That is what you are, right? A ghoul in a robe. It hangs loosely off your wrists, like a child wearing his father’s outfits and pretending to be big and strong when he is instead small, weak, pathetic.
And yet you know that it isn’t the same thing, because this robe doesn’t hang off of you because you’re the wrong size. It’s because you’re the wrong you. The wrong kind. You are unworthy of it. Nobody was good enough, least of all you.
Izzy was wrong. You are not an empty shell of a man. The robe is the shell. You are a hermit crab who has moved in, who has the audacity to pluck the shell from the sea floor and masquerade around in it, pretending to be someone worth loving, worth cherishing. Your hand touches the velvet, dirtied from wear and lack of care and burning, and the softness of it mocks you. You will never be enough. You never were.
There is nobody left. At least, you don’t see them. Not even Izzy. The entire ship is a ghost ship, now, it seems. You don’t leave your cabin now, not ever. There is no point. You are beyond surviving. You are simply waiting for the end.
And you’re still thinking (thinking has gone so well in the past, might as well keep going) you’re thinking that if you’re really going to give up the ghost, you might as well break the seal. You might as well hide among the linens and the velvet and the smell of lavender. You might as well pretend, for a little bit, before it’s done.
So you limp your crippled fucking ass to the auxiliary closet and press down on the lever.
You close your eyes as the door swings open and you step in, inhaling the smell of him, the wonderful perfumes and soaps, flowery and sweet like honey, smoky like burning flesh. The door to the wardrobe slides closed behind you.
You open your eyes to find the hanged man there.
His flesh is charred, his hands folded politely, and he’s just fucking burnt, roasted, unrecognizable. A green cravat twists around his snapped neck, and goes up, up towards the soot-soaked ceiling.
Fuck.
You reach out and poke it. It sways a bit, but does not move. It is dead. This thing is dead. It isn’t real.
There is nobody here but you.
There is nobody here but you.
There is nobody here but you.
It is very, very important that you believe this, that you recognize this. You are alone. There is nobody here but you.
Wisps of smoke begin to trickle out of the corpse’s neck.
And there is nobody here but you.
The smoke becomes heavier now, heavier and darker, heavier and angry, and now you can’t see its head at all. Just the smoke.
Just the burning red eyes sharing through it, staring down at you.
There is nobody here but you.
You blink and the hanged man is wearing a black jacket, leather pants, your favorite shirt. He has one gun and one knife. Just like everybody else. Just like you.
There is nobody here but you.
You close your eyes and force yourself to say it.
“There is nobody here but me.”
And for a moment, everything stops. Your eyes stay closed, and it’s just a normal closet, and you hear the footsteps of your crew above you, Izzy’s angry shouts and corrections, Frenchie’s lute.
“There is nobody here but me.”
You pause and take it in. And then you open your mouth.
“And me.”
The Kraken. Blackbeard. Black. Beard. The monster within. The jailer, the prisoner, the inevitable.
And you begin to laugh, you laugh like a fucking maniac, you laugh like a demented freak, and the robe slips from your shoulders to the floor and you sink down with it.
You open your eyes and grab another bottle of rum off the floor of this trashed, dirty wardrobe, and stare up at the empty ceiling. You’re laughing so hard there are tears running down your face.
The tears keep coming as you collapse onto the ground, grasping for another pair of his stockings to wipe off your pathetic fucking face. And you wait for your body to die so it can follow your soul into Hell.