The Ghost of Cabin 664 Read online



  The Ghost of Cabin 664

  by

  Patrick Riot

  Digital Edition ISBN 9781476271637

  Copyright 2012 Patrick Riot

  Foo Foo

  Cover Photograph by Chris Jones

  Used under the Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC 2.0)

  For Mom and Dad

  Thank you

  Table of Contents

  Story

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  It must be my face, Lenny thought as he rubbed his neck.

  His mother had always said that he had an open face. It was a face that invited conversation, but to a social isolationist like Lenny it was the sole reason he usually avoided bars of any sort. He didn't like having to play bar-stool psychologist to the miserable drunkards of the world, but somehow, whenever he tried to sneak into the occasional tavern, they would hunt him down. The unfortunate irony was that even though he hated bars, he loved beer and he was absolutely certain that the best beer came from a cold keg and not from a bottle.

  A pox on my face!

  Lenny stifled the inevitable giggle – the one that had gotten him into so much trouble over the years – behind another swallow from his mug. He set the glass down heavily on the bar and regarded the old man.

  He didn't look insane. Rather, he resembled a ragged shrew, and while he might have once cut an imposing figure, time had shriveled the oak to a reed, and he appeared ready to snap under the gentlest of breezes. His features were hawkish, narrow, harsh. His disheveled, stark-white hair clung to his head like delicate wisps of cotton candy. He had no jacket and his tie listed heavily to starboard. His thin hand shook as he lifted his drink and downed it in one gulp.

  “Haunted, you say?” Lenny asked.

  “Yes, haunted.” The old man's voice was hollow. He clutched at the bar, his knuckles practically glowing white-hot under the stretched, ancient vellum of his skin.

  Lenny looked doubtful, but said nothing.

  “Find out what it wants, and I'll pay you $5,000 dollars,” the man said in desperation as he rubbed his forehead. “Cabin 664.”

  # # #

  Lenny regarded the door to Cabin 664 and thought it looked just like every other cabin door that he had passed in this corridor: a little more upscale than most on the ship, but otherwise a perfect replica of the previous doors on this deck.

  Ghosts, he thought. The guy is insane.

  He didn't believe in ghosts, but he had a solid belief in cash. Five grand was five grand, so he decided to humor the old man and make an easy wad of money.

  As Lenny turned the knob the door swung open with a modest creak. The cabin beyond was far larger than his own, which amounted to nothing more than a single bed stuffed into a cracker box with little room left for navigation. The entry here gave way to a living room with a vaulted ceiling and dinette, with the actual bedroom through a door to the fore wall. A veranda lay beyond a shattered sliding glass door, its frame lined with sword-like shards of glass. Though Lenny couldn't see it through the blackness of night, he could hear the sea beyond its toothy maw. A lamp was smashed in one corner. A basket of fruit had been knocked off the dining table and the fruit was on the floor alongside the latest (torn-up) issue of Condé Nast Traveler. The cabinets in the dinette were open and all of the contents had been strewn asunder. The entirety of the old man's personal effects made a trail from the living room to the bedroom: clothing, toiletries, medications, papers. A sofa was aft and its cushions were flipped haphazardly to its foot. The coffee table was askew. A slashed-up, leather wing-backed chair faced the sea.

  “Ah, Old American Tantrum décor... Nice,” Lenny muttered as he surveyed the mess.

  Stepping further into the cabin caused glass to crunch beneath his feet.

  Lenny examined the vaulted ceiling. A mahogany-veneered structural beam crossed from the dropped ceiling of the entry to the upper corner of the sliding glass door. The vault was at least two feet higher than he could reach, and two broad sun windows were set into the ceiling. Had it been day, the living room would be alive with the tropical sun, but now there was only darkness. Not even the moon shone through.

  Lenny walked toward the glass door and was careful not to touch it. He peered into the blackness, listening to the sea beyond.

  “There's not much of a view this time of night,” said a sad, forlorn voice from behind him.

  Lenny spun around. What he saw in the wing-backed chair caused hot electricity to course through his nervous system as his adrenal glands opened a flood gate of the precious, potentially life-saving fluid.

  Sitting in the wing-back chair was a specter, a shade, an apparition. Even though it appeared humanoid, it was almost wholly transparent. The slices in the chair's leather could be seen through the thing's most translucent parts. It emitted a faint, ethereal blue-green glow, and suddenly the smell of brimstone overpowered the rotten salt reek of the sea. The creature's near-invisible skin hung loosely on its faded bones like tatters of cloth flowing in the wind. The shade crossed its legs and leaned back in the chair, a grinning skull.

  Lenny made his best effort to appear casual in spite of the shock given to him by the specter. He stuck one shaky hand in the breast pocket of his jacket and brought out a metal cigarette case.

  “So, you're the ghost,” Lenny said as he worked out a cigarette.

  “You're an insightful one,” the ghost replied.

  “Don't believe in ghosts.”

  “Believe what you will, but I assure you that this is reality, and that I am real,” the ghost said.

  “Is this your cabin?” Lenny popped the cigarette between his lips.

  “No.”

  “Did the old man trash this place?” Lenny asked as he gestured toward the room with his lighter. He then reached up and ignited the cigarette. Lenny tried to ignore the palsy of his hand.

  “The old man is impotent,” the ghost said.

  “So, what did, then? You suggesting that you made this mess?” Lenny asked. He picked up a cushion from the floor and replaced it on the sofa.

  “Yes.”

  “All right, assuming I believe you... Why?” Lenny sat down on the sofa and put his elbows on his knees. He took another drag and regarded the creature. He discovered that he felt no fear now that the adrenaline was fading, but rather he began to feel an inexplicable pity for the creature, for it sounded so sad, as if it bore the burden of countless atrocities and its soul was weighing upon it.

  “Did the old man tell you who he was?” asked the ghost.

  “No,” Lenny replied. “We didn't exchange names.”

  “His name is Parker Tigh, and for the past twenty years, he's been the hangingest judge in Texas,” the ghost replied, his shoulders slumping. “They called him Judge 'Rope Neck' Tigh. Sentenced over 120 people to death, 63 of whom were completely innocent. He's retired now. Booked this cruise with his wife last year, two months before she died of a stroke. He decided that she would have wanted him to go on the cruise alone, but he's wrong about that.”

  “How do you know that?” Lenny asked.

  “She told me,” the ghost replied, in a forlorn nonchalance.

  Lenny frowned as he looked for a place to tap the growing ash of his cigarette. Finding nothing suitable within arm's reach, he tapped the ash onto the burgundy carpet and ran his shoe over it, leaving behind a a dull, gray smudge.

  “I've seen a lot of things in my life, but you take the cake,” Lenny said. “You still haven't told me why you're doing this. Is it personal?”

  “You could say that,” the ghost said as he made himself more comfortable in the leather chair. “My name was Martin Lavine and I was once in love with a beautiful
woman. More importantly, she was in love with me. We met in Cannes, and I must say that it was love at first sight. We never left her hotel room during the entire time we were together. Only on her last day, right before she boarded her plane, she told me that she was married. She had no ring that I saw. Edith was her name, and she was a remarkable woman, from Boston. Old money. She had married right out of high school, to a hot-shot attorney just out of Harvard, and on their tenth anniversary, he sent her to France, and that’s where the two of us met and fell in love. After Cannes, I moved all the way from Indiana to be near her, to Houston.

  “The next ten years were happy ones, even though she couldn't be mine. That hardly mattered, anyway. We were always together. Her husband had been moving up in the District Attorney's office, and was never at home for her, and I helped to fill her voids,” the ghost said.

  Lenny stood and threw the cigarette butt through the shattered glass window, and it flew into the sea. He then turned and watched the ghost expectantly.

  “Eight years after I had moved to Houston, the police showed up at my door and arrested me for the murder of a neighbor, a woman I had seen a few times around the complex, but one that I assuredly did not murder. Having no alibi, I bounced through the court like a rabid kangaroo, and my defense attorney was a drunken sham. Edith, of course, abandoned me.

  “I was found guilty, based on circumstantial evidence, and sentenced to death. It turns out that my only crime was loving Edith. After my sentencing I received an unsigned postcard, postmarked in Cannes. It had three words: 'He knew everything.' And that was all, though the 'i' did have a heart as its dot. That was 1982. I was put to death in 1985 in accordance with the laws of the state of Texas.”

  “Why wait twenty years to haunt the judge who sentenced you?”

  “You do not understand,” the ghost said, and folded his hands in his lap. “Judge Tigh was Edith's husband. He did not sentence me, he arranged to have me set up, arrested, tried, convicted and put to death for having him cuckolded.”

  “So, then why wait so long?”

  “Time works differently for the two of us, but I've waited partially out of respect for Edith and partially because—until recently—I had been employed in various other ghostly enterprises. I was laid off several months ago, and found myself with little to do.”

  “Laid off?” Lenny quirked an eyebrow.

  “If you think your economy is bad, wait until you see the economy of the afterlife,” the ghost said. “Though I think I've got a few leads on a job.”

  “The old man sent me down here to ask what you wanted from him.”

  “I will not discuss terms,” the ghost said. “I have come for my revenge. He will feel terror before he feels the icy grip of death, terror for the rest of his life. When you next see him, you may tell him one thing, and one thing only: my name.”