This Place

So picture this. This room, right, is wood paneled, but not just that. Wood floors, wood ceilings; a place where you wouldn’t want to light a fire, in other words, even if it weren’t for the barrels of gunpowder beneath the floorboards.

But then again, at this moment, every bit of wood is choked through and through with salt-water, and it’s all been soaking so long that, maybe, you could never set it on fire if you tried.

It’s plenty quiet here, sure, but there are some signs of life. The repetitive motion of the room as the ship lists back and forth, the first mate’s book still open to a page that is blurred by all the sea air, but still preserved enough to show the beginning of a sketch of the ship’s ratter, an outline of shoulders and ears and some teeth. The captain’s table in the corner is set for what was clearly a feast, although all that’s left is some odd bones and scraps.

This room might be better defined by what is missing, though, as the crew is nowhere to be found. The things they left behind, the lifeboats, the food stores, the weapons, the captains log, are all untouched, and hold no apparent clues to the disappearance. Not that it matters much. The ship is ancient; whether the crew lived, or died, they’re all certainly gone by now. Their fate is even more conspicuously absent than they are. One hundred years later, we might never find out what happened to them, or why they abandoned the ship. At this point, they’re not much more a half-told ghost story, part of a joke with a long set up but no punchline, an inchoate draft of a cheesy mystery novel that will never have an ending, as much as you might want to dream one up.