R. Lafferty - The 7th Ghost Story Megapack

She would talk to you about Jesse like he’d come back any day, and tell you all the things they were going to do. Then if you mentioned any other subject she would just stare off into space and didn’t even hear you.

As soon as she was able, she started going back to the beach every evening with a lantern. Her folks tried to talk her out of it, but it wasn’t any use. I tell you it was pitiful—her waiting and longing, and waving that lantern for Jesse, dead sure he would come back to her.

Whenever we’d come in after dark we’d see her lantern swinging along the beach. It got to be right spooky! Gave you kind of a creepy feeling! Boats from other keys saw it, too, and pretty soon everybody knew about the “Lantern Girl.” The name we had given her in that laughing way wasn’t funny anymore.

It was so pitiful it kind of squeezed your heart. Then one night Anabelle didn’t come home.

They found her sitting on the beach leaning against a palm stump, her new lantern beside her. Her hands were folded in her lap, and her eyes were wide-open staring out to sea—where Jesse had gone! She was stone dead! She’d been dead quite a while.… But her lantern still burned!

They buried Anabelle on the mainland. Maybe I oughtn’t say it, but I found it quite a relief not to see her lantern swinging to and fro on the black shoreline every time you brought your boat in after dark!

That was in the late fall. Winter tourists began to arrive. The Keys are pretty busy in tourist season, what with sports fishermen coming down and millionaires’ luxury yachts basking in our winter sunshine. As usual, some of us painted up our boats and left Pelican Key. We shaved every day, put on yacht uniforms and went into charterboat service for the winter months.

In the spring, as tourist business went slack we drifted back to commercial fishing, and old Cap’n Ludberry welcomed us again to Pelican Key.

By then, Anabelle had become just a legend to most of us.

That was a trying summer. Hot and still, with lots of nasty weather between times. And then something happened that was eerie enough in itself, even if you wasn’t squeamish. But it wasn’t a patch on what was coming.

I forget now who first saw the thing but it happened on an afternoon when we ran in ahead of a stiff squall. One of the fellows had motor trouble, and came in after dark, looking kind of pale around the gills. He was pretty mad, too, of two minds whether to have the shivers about what he’d seen, or to jump whoever had been playing a pretty gruesome joke on him.

“Who waved that lantern down on the beach?” was the first thing he asked.

Nobody, as far as we knew, and it was some time before he would believe it. Then finally he admitted it looked awfully like Anabelle’s lantern.

Well, sir, we kidded him high about that. Told him a lightning bug had scared him. But if we’d had any slightest idea of what was coming our laughs might have been more like the soundless ones of grinning skulls.

The same thing happened again several times that summer. Always to different people, and always during bad weather. A few of us still laughed about it, and the rest just tried to. Things like that have a way of sticking in your mind, and a man doesn’t spend his life on the open sea where he’s pretty close to the stars and the wide ocean that just seems to go on and on without coming to think a lot of things might happen that plenty of folks would never believe could happen.

It must have been close to a year since Jesse had been lost in the Kingfisher , that my boat went on the ways with a broken rudder. While waiting shipment of parts, I helped Cap’n Ludberry on his boat. We were fishing farther out than usual when a big squall began making up. Ludberry signaled the other boats and we started for shore.

“Course this ain’t no hurricane,” he said to me, “but the weather looks just like it did a year ago when we lost Jesse.”

Funny! Neither of us had mentioned Jesse, but I’d been thinking exactly the same thing.

That squall came up in no time. The wind hit us long before we reached the reef. Inside the reef is shallow water, and three miles of narrow channel with coral bottom on either side. No place to be in a blow, when you can’t see twenty yards through the rain.

The wind had risen to a gale in no time. Ludberry saw the rain would catch us in the channel if we kept on our course, so he circled back out to sea, all the other boats following, and headed into the storm. Better to ride it out in deep water than risk ripping a bottom on the coral.

That was some blow! The wind came straight out of the east, and lasted until after dark.

Then it was over as suddenly as it started. Squalls are like that down here.

We had already run up our lights, and when the rain stopped I spotted the lights of several of our boats. When we crossed the reef and entered the channel it looked like the whole fleet was following us.

“Count ’em up,” said Cap’n Ludberry. “Ought to be twelve boats, counting us.”

I counted as we rounded an elbow in the channel. “Thirteen,” I said.

“Can’t be,” said Ludberry, and he named them off. “Take the wheel while I count ’em.”

“Thirteen’s right!” he said, after a while.

There was something in his voice that made you shiver as hard as knowing there was thirteen boats—and deep down inside you knowing who was steering that extra boat. Though you wouldn’t have said a word about that to save your life. You just knew somehow. That was enough. And it made your tongue stick tight to the roof of your mouth, and feel like you didn’t have anything but water in your veins. It was that spooky.

“Must have picked up a stranger somewheres,” Ludberry said, calmly, but you could tell easy he didn’t feel so calm.

We said no more about it then, for Pelican Key loomed black ahead of us.

Then something caught my eye and I just about stopped breathing. It filled in with this other thing that already had my skin crawling and my heart in my mouth.

First time I’d seen the thing! Along the shore of Pelican Key a light was moving. A light like somebody waving a lantern! Anabelle’s lantern?

I’d laughed at the other fellows for getting scared of a speck of light a mile away. I didn’t laugh now! I had a feeling like a trickle of ice water was running down my back. When Ludberry spoke, right at my elbow, I’d of jumped out of my shoes if I hadn’t been barefooted!

“Do you see what I do?” he asked, and I’d never heard Ludberry’s voice sound so shaky and uncertain, ever before.

I swallowed hard. “Cap’n, it—it’s Anabelle’s light.”

“It’s some darn fool playing a trick on us,” said the old man. He was trying to convince himself—I could see that—but wasn’t making such a good job of it. For from the looks of his eyes, if ever a man was seeing ghosts, Cap’n Ludberry was.

I hoped he was right, though, and said so. Ludberry swallowed hard.

“I’m going to find out who it is,” Ludberry said, kinda tight and anxious, though, “and wring his neck.”

He knew who was holding that lantern just as well as I did—but neither one of us would admit that it was Anabelle. Why, she was lying quiet in her grave over the mainland, and how could she—

As we rounded Pelican Key, the light still waved. I watched it till the mangrove trees on the point of the island hid the beach from sight, and I got an idea that sure enough there was something about that light that sure wasn’t like any light that ever was in this world.

We slipped into the lagoon and tied up in a hurry. The other boats came in close behind us. I counted them again. In fact, I counted them several times. Twelve! Only twelve! Had another boat come in with the fleet, and then somehow disappeared? Because there wasn’t a chance in the world that Cap’n Ludberry and I hadn’t seen and counted thirteen boats outside!