Free Ghost Night by Heather Graham Page B

They’d dined on spaghetti and meatballs, heated up in the microwave.
    She was startled to hear her husband call her name. “Jenny!”
    She nearly dropped the dish in her hand, it had been so quiet. She set it on the counter and hurried up the ladder to the deck. For a moment, it struck her that they might as well be alone in the world. Entirely alone. There were a few stars in a black-velvet sky, and it seemed that there was no horizon, the sea melded with the sky. The lights of the Happy-Me were colorful and brave against the night—and pitiful, as well.
    “Hand me the grapple pole there, quickly, Jenny,” Mark said, leaning over the hull and staring into the water.
    “What?”
    She was concerned. Mark had been given a clean bill of health after having suffered a heart attack on his seventieth birthday, but he thought himself a young man still, at times. And he was acting like a crazy one now.
    “That one,” he said, spinning around. There was a grappling hook on a long pole set in its place in metal brackets against the wall of the cabin.
    “But, Mark—”
    “Please, Jenny, please—there’s someone in the water!”
    She heard it then: a gasped and garbled plea for help.
    While Mark continued to stare into the water, Jenny reached for the hook, almost ripping it from the wall to bring to Mark.
    He stuck it out into the water, calling out, “Here, here, take this, we’ll get you aboard!
    “Ah!” he murmured. Jenny saw that someone had the pole and that Mark was managing to pull the person closer to the boat.
    “The flashlight, get a flashlight!” Mark said.
    Jenny turned to do so. As she did, she heard another gasping sound, and within it a little cry of terror.
    She spun around.
    The sound was coming from Mark. Because someone… something …was rising from the sea.
    It couldn’t be. It was a bony pirate, half-eaten, so it appeared, in rags. Bones and rags, and it was laughing….
    “No!” Jenny gasped herself.
    The thing reached out and grabbed Mark around the neck. It lifted him and tossed him overboard. Jenny started to scream in protest, horrified for Mark, her companion, friend, lover, husband for all of her life.
    And then…
    In terror herself. For her own life.
    Because now the thing pulled a sword. A fat sword. Maybe it wasn’t a sword. Maybe it was a machete. Maybe it was…
    Her last conscious thought was, What the hell does it matter what it is?
    It swung in the night.
    She never managed to scream. Her windpipe was severed before she could do so. She dropped to the deck, her head dangling from the remnants of her neck.
    “Quickly,” said the one to the other, joining him on board. “Quickly. The other two, before they wake up!”
    The deck was drenched as they walked across it and down the ladder to the cabin below.
    Gabby and Dale never woke up.
    For a while, the Happy-Me rolled in the gentle waves of the night, beneath the velvet darkness of the sky.
    Then it sank to a shallow grave.

3
    V anessa had the dreams again that night.
    They had started the night on the island when Georgia had talked about the monsters, left the island with Carlos—and wound up murdered with her head on the sand.
    For the first weeks after the incident, they’d come frequently. They would start with her being Isabella, rising from the sea in her period gown, covered with seaweed.
    Vanessa had agreed to play the small role of Isabella, and the day when they had filmed her in the costume had turned out to be fun—after she’d calmed down from being aggravated. There she had been in that gown, floating—a corpse that had come to the surface, about to open its long-dead eyes—and they were supposed to have been filming from beneath her. But in the middle of the shoot, they’d gotten distracted by a school of barracuda, and she’d looked up at last to see that the boat was far away and there was no sign of the others. She was a good swimmer, but the seas were beginning to rise and the gown was heavy. She