Something's going to happen—something dreadful I just know it!"
"Oh—be sensible, Vilma!" There was a hint of impatience in Cliff's deep voice. A gorgeous girl in his arms—dark-haired, dark-eyed, made for love—and she talked of dreadful things which were going to happen because the moon looked screwy.
She released herself and glanced out over the sea, "I know I'm silly, but" Her voice froze and her slender body stiffened. "Cliff—look!"
Darrell spun around, and as he stared, he felt a dryness seeping into his throat, choking him...
Out of the winding-sheet of fog into the moonlight crept a strange, strange craft, her crumbling timbers blackened and rotted with incredible age. The corpse of a ship, she seemed, resurrected from the grave of the sea. Her prow thrust upward like a simitar bent backward, hovering over the gaunt ruin of a cabin whose seaward sides were formed by port and starboard bows. From a shallow pit amidships jutted the broken arm of a mast, its splintered tip pointing toward the blindly watching moon. The stern, thickly covered with the moldering encrustations of age, curved inward above the strange high poop, beneath which lay another cabin. And along either side of her worm-eaten freeboard ran a row of apertures like oblong portholes. Out of these projected great oars, long, unwieldy, as somberly black as the rest of the ancient bulk.
Now a sound drifted across the waters, the steady, rhythmic br-rr-oom, br-rr-oom, br-rr-oom of a drum beating time for the rowers, Its hollow thud checked the heart, set it to throbbing in tempo with its own weary pulse. Ghostly fingers, dripping dread, crawled up Darrell's spine.
Stiff-lipped, Vilma gasped: "What—what is it?"
Cliff answered in a dry husky voice, the words seeming to trip over an awkward tongue. "It's—it's—it can't be, damn it!—but it's a galley, a ship from the days of Alexander the Great! What's it doing—here—now?"
Closer she came through the moon-path, a frothing lip of brine curling away from her swelling prow. Closer—her course crossing that of the Ariel—and the watchers saw her crew! They gasped, and the blood ebbed from their faces.
Men of ancient Persia, clad in leather kirtles and rusted armor, and they were hideous! In the yellow moon-glow Cliff could see them clearly now—a lookout standing motionless in the stem, the steersman on the poop-deck, the drummer squatting beside the broken mast, the rowers in the pit—and all, all were a bloodless white, the skin of their faces puffed and bloated and horribly wrinkled, like flesh that had been under water a long time.
Dead men ... men whose movements were stiffly wooden ... as dead as their faces. But most horrible was the fact that they were there, that they moved at all!
"A queer mirage, isn't it?" A hollow voice spoke suavely behind them. Vilma gasped at the sudden sound, and they whirled. A foot away stood the tall, lean figure of the Ariel's captain, Leon Corio. A queer smile twisted his thin lips.
"What's the idea—sneaking up on us?" Darrell demanded angrily. He didn't like this man, hadn't liked him from the moment he had approached Cliff to sell him the yacht. But Cliff had bought the craft because she was a bargain, and in accordance with their agreement he had hired Corio as captain.
The tall man's smile remained fixed, and he bowed gravely. "Sorry, sir. I always walk softly, A habit, I suppose."
