Kraken

By Emily Allen, aged 16

My job, they said, was to watch. 

            The pirates found me bleeding to death after they had attacked my ship, one from the governor’s fleet.  The ship was full of soldiers – and me. I was a stowaway.  Now, I was a prisoner. 

            When the pirates attacked, they weren’t looking to steal; they were looking to kill.  I was below deck, hiding in a cubbyhole where I’d been since we had left London, but I could hear the screams.  And it was impossible to miss the crimson blood that spattered onto me, pouring through the leaky floorboards. 

            No, these weren’t pirates.  Pirates had a code.  These were something darker – something made darker from whatever they had seen in the North.  The black waters, they called them – some described them to me as an abyss where water should’ve been.

           After the screams had stopped, I had climbed to the top of the ship, not wanting to be onboard when the pirates sunk it.  That was, I learned quickly, a mistake.

            The pirates were still there when I gained the courage to pull myself onto the deck, and they didn’t stop to see that I wasn’t wearing the same scarlet uniform as all the other men they had killed; promptly, I felt a searing heat in my back.  It was like nothing I’d ever felt before – hot and cold and utter agony.  The blood I was drenched in was suddenly my own, and I crumpled to the deck, only able to comprehend snippets of conversation. 

            “Damn it, is he wearing a uniform?  Only uniformed!”

            “Get him up.”

            This, I remember the clearest – they hoisted me up by my arms, wrenching my wound in a way more painful than the stab itself.  That was where my memory ended.

            It started again when I woke up on a piss-stained hammock wrapped in unchanged, bloody bandages.  Reminiscent to the day that had damned me initially, I had stumbled to the deck, suddenly swarmed by a number of pirates. 

            “Your job is to watch,” the first mate had said, promptly setting off.

            “Wait,” I had called, “watch for what?”

            “You’ll know it when you see it.”

            So I spent weeks straight staring at the ocean, regardless of the time or weather.  It had to be some cruel punishment, I was sure of it; the water was perpetually empty, stretching for miles with not so much of a ripple.  All those days, and not a single fish.

            But at week 4, I noticed a change: thousands of thrashing bubbles floating to the surface.  A fish, the first I’d ever seen, floated to the top, blood pouring out of a slash on its side.  Hundreds followed. 

            “Cap’n…”

I tore my eyes away, turning to look at the deckhands, and shouted.  “Captain!”

            I readied myself to scream again, but it died in my throat as something rose from the sea to block out the sun, something ancient and not from my world.

            A tentacle, I realized too late.

            “Kraken.”