Tales of Terror from the Black Ship

Tales of Terror from the Black Ship

Chris Priestley

Language: English

Pages: 256

ISBN: 1599902907

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


When Ethan and Cathy fall ill during a storm, their father must leave them to fetch the doctor. . .but they are not alone for long. A sailor comes begging for shelter. So, the children agree to let him sit out the throes of the storm as they listen to his grisly tales. But something about the man puts Ethan on edge, and he is anxious for the storm to blow over, their father to return and the long night to come to an end.

Storms whistling through the sails, evil pirates pacing the floorboards, and of course, a haunted ship of ghostly beings… All this and more is waiting to give you goose bumps in an atmospheric and thrilling collection of spooky seafaring tales.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the wall of the dreaded den in Nagasaki. ‘Help me, Mattie!’ cried Stephen. But Mattie was shaking with fear, pointing to the tattoo as it swam round once more. The collars on the chain the demon carried were no longer empty. Three men now swung by their necks, screaming silently in torment: the man they thought had been washed overboard in the storm and the two who had supposedly deserted. The demon ceased its giddying movements and settled on Stephen’s chest, where it rose, expanding all the

know so many stories,’ she said. ‘Are you a writer, Mr Thackeray?’ ‘A writer?’ said Thackeray with a grin. ‘Me? No, no, Miss Cathy. I am a sailor, nothing more.’ ‘Then how do you come by such tales?’ I said. ‘Who makes them up if it is not you?’ ‘It is a tradition aboard our ship that the men tell each other stories to while away the long sea hours. Sailors live a life at the edge of humanity, not quite a part of it, not quite removed. It is a world of shadows and shifting light, like the

had trays full of beetles and cabinets of moths and butterflies, all pinned to boards with their names written down in George’s neat italic script. He had developed a special interest in snails and had boxes of their shells and page upon page of drawings he had made of the patterns they carried. Indeed his father had once jokingly suggested that George was more interested in ‘those damned snails’ than he was in his own family. But George had not laughed. Instead of the dynamic life his brothers

then the screaming began again. Mercifully, it did not last long. ‘An old sea dog told me once that sharks come to movement like they come to blood and that the thing to do is to keep still. So that’s what I tried to do, though I had to tread water to stop myself drifting on to the reef. ‘The sharks gorged themselves and I saw smaller fish move in to pick the bones while sea birds flew in, squawking, dropping to the water and flying off with some vile piece of meat hanging from their beaks.

seen that flea-bitten creature kill a thousand times with no more motive than boredom or amusement, torturing some mouse for half an hour before absent-mindedly leaving its headless, uneaten corpse as litter on the deck. How dare this murderous devil judge him? Just because he reserved some special affection for that bully Harper! It was offensive, and in spite of the fact that none of the crew could possibly know why the cat stared at him so, Tom still vowed that he would not tolerate it. When

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