Henry's Plank

The story of a young pirate in the aftermath of a defeating battle. Work in progress.

Dead Man’s Cove was a gash in the Colombian coast, a hidden scar where the sea whispered secrets and the air thrummed with a beauty so sharp it cut. The battle was done, its wreckage strewn like a butcher’s leavings—splintered oak, charred spars, and the blackened bones of ships sinking into the abyss. Smoke curled thick as a devil’s shroud, choking the cove, while waves lapped at the debris with a lover’s cruel kiss. The sun, a pale eye in the haze, offered no mercy to the lone survivor, Henry Moran, an eighteen-year-old pirate whelp, bloodied, burned, and half-drowned, clinging to a jagged plank. The salt air stung his lungs, mingling with the reek of smoldering wood and gunpowder, a scent every pirate knew like a mother’s lullaby. Around him, the cove was a graveyard, and the Mermaid’s figurehead—a carved siren with hollow eyes—bobbed nearby, her wooden gaze mocking his survival. Mermaids, the old salts swore, brought storms, shipwrecks, and death, and Henry’s gut twisted with the superstition that clung to him like damp rot.

“Anyone out there?” Henry croaked, his voice raw, swallowed by the smoke. His dark hair was matted with blood, his green eyes clouded from the salt and the blow that’d split his brow. Panic clawed his chest as he paddled through the wreckage, past the bloated arm of a shipmate, past a shattered rum cask leaking its guts into the sea. “Please, God, someone!” His cries were desperate, a boy’s plea against the vast, uncaring cove. The plank beneath him groaned, a pitiful raft in a sea that wanted him dead. He was no sailor, not really—just a lad who’d signed on with Captain Harrow’s crew for a taste of glory, only to find fire and ruin.

The current tugged harder now, a cold hand dragging him toward the open sea. His strength was fading, his burned hands slipping on the plank’s scorched edge. “No, no, not like this,” he muttered, his voice breaking. Then—a sound, sharp and wrong, cutting through the waves’ murmur. A splash, too deliberate, too alive. “Shark,” he whispered, his heart lurching. The cove was a feeding ground now, and he was chum. Visibility was nothing, the smoke a wall, but the splashes circled, closer, a rhythm like a war drum. “Stay calm, Henry, stay calm,” he hissed to himself, hauling his trembling body fully onto the plank, curling tight, knees to chest, like a child hiding from the thing under the bed. A sudden thump rocked the plank, nearly pitching him into the water. “Get away!” he screamed, his voice cracking as the unseen beast brushed beneath, its bulk a shadow in the murk.

“Henry, you fool, you’re done,” he muttered, his breath hitching. The splashes grew bolder, multiple now, as if the sharks were toying with him, their fins slicing the surface like black blades. He clutched the plank, whispering prayers his mother taught him in a Bristol slum, words of miracles and mercy that felt hollow here. Then, without warning, the sharks vanished. The sea went still—no waves, no creaking debris, no wind. Silence, heavy and wrong, pressed down, a quiet so deep it screamed madness. Henry’s ears rang with it, his pulse a hammer in his skull. The smoke parted, slow and deliberate, like a curtain drawn by unseen hands, and there—a great white’s fin, massive, spearing straight for him, its wake a frothing arrow.

“No more,” Henry rasped, lifting his face to the sky, arms spread wide, surrendering to the sea’s cold embrace. “Take me.” The shark’s charge hit like a cannon, a thunderous wave that flung him from the plank, his body cartwheeling into the water. Time slowed, each second a lifetime as he sank, the cove’s depths yawning below. He was aware—too aware—of the blood clouding from his wounds, the chill seeping into his bones, but he didn’t fight. Skyward, through the wavering surface, he saw the sun blur, a dying star. Then, at the edge of oblivion, a black cloud surged up, not water but a writhing mass of tentacles, fine as Jamaican vine roots, ink-black and alive. They enveloped him, a thousand silken threads binding his arms, his legs, his chest, swallowing him whole like krill in a whale’s maw.

Henry thrashed, a scream bubbling in his throat, but the air—impossibly—filled his lungs. He was breathing, trapped in a dark, pulsing womb that smelled of brine and decay. “Am I dead?” he gasped, his voice echoing in the void. “Is this hell?” No answer came, only the thrum of the thing that held him, a heartbeat older than the sea itself. Time twisted, minutes stretching into years. In that black cocoon, Henry’s mind broke and rebuilt itself. He saw himself as Captain Moran, a swashbuckling privateer, his ship The Black Thorn carving a legend along the Mexican coast. He plundered Spanish galleons, outwitted rival corsairs, and bedded dark-eyed maidens in moonlit ports. His name was a curse to his enemies, a prayer to his crew. But it was a lie, a fever dream spun by the thing that cradled him.

Ten years passed in the real world, a blink in Henry’s false reality. During a raid on a fortified caravel, a powder keg’s blast tore through his dream, shattering the illusion. He woke, gasping, in the same black womb, the tentacles still tight around him. A piercing light stabbed through the dark, the vines retracting, peeling back like a blooming flower. Henry flailed, choking on seawater as he broke the surface, his plank—impossibly—still floating nearby. The cove was empty, no debris, no smoke, no fire. Just the sea, vast and silent, and the Mermaid’s figurehead, grinning like it knew his fate.

“Noooo!” Henry screamed, his voice a raw wound as he clawed for the plank, his body weak, his mind frayed. He hauled himself aboard, coughing, shivering, his burned hands bleeding anew. “Why?” he sobbed, staring at the endless horizon. “Why am I still here?” The sea offered no answer, but the air grew heavy, and a faint hum rose, not unlike the Jagged Star’s chant from Otsego’s cursed tales. Something watched him, not shark nor mermaid, but older, hungrier, its presence stitched into the cove’s very waves.

“Henry,” a voice whispered, not from the sea but inside his skull, low and slick as oil. “You’re mine now.” He froze, his breath catching, as the plank rocked gently, unmoored by any wave. “Who’s there?” he shouted, his voice cracking. “Show yourself!” Silence answered, but the hum grew louder, and in the distance, a shadow moved beneath the water—not a fin, but something vast, serpentine, its outline blurring the line between beast and nightmare.

“Get away from me!” Henry roared, gripping the plank, his green eyes wild. He fumbled for the dagger at his belt, a rusted thing he’d scavenged from the wreckage, and brandished it at the empty sea. “I’m not your prey!” But the shadow circled, patient, and the hum became a song, a dirge that tugged at his soul. He remembered the old sailors’ tales— not of mermaids, but of the Cove Wraith, a thing born when the first ship sank here, fed by blood and despair, binding souls to its will.

“Fight it, lad,” he muttered, channeling the grit of his imagined captain’s life. “You’re Henry Moran, not some ghost’s puppet.” But his strength was gone, his body a wreck of burns and hunger. The shadow rose closer, its form breaking the surface—a mass of writhing vines, eyes like lanterns in the deep, and a maw that sang his name. “Join us,” it crooned, and Henry’s dagger slipped from his hand, splashing uselessly into the water.

“No,” he whispered, but his voice was small, a boy’s again. The plank tilted, and he slid toward the edge, the Wraith’s tentacles reaching, not to kill but to claim. “I’m not yours,” he gasped, one last defiance before the vines coiled tight, pulling him under. The cove closed over him, silent once more, the Mermaid’s figurehead the only witness to Henry Moran’s end—or his beginning as something else, something the sea would never let go.