Jenny
The winds were light and steady, the sea was calm and gentle and the few sailors on duty had little to do. They were mostly clustered near the stern, talking quietly to one another and smoking, enjoying the balmy tropical night.
Freddy leaned on the railing amidships, staring out over the glassy sea at the impossibly huge full moon. Absentmindedly he swung his guitar free and strummed a chord.
From above, high in the darkness of the sails and rigging, he was surprised to hear an answer. Sweet and clear, the sound of a violin sent a haunting refrain down into the night.
Freddy paused his strumming and looked up into darkness. Even with eyes that could pierce the darkest night, he could see nothing.
The refrain rang out again, sweet and clear under the moonlight.
And again, as if beckoning. Calling to him.
Freddy chewed his lip, considering a harmony, and then he strummed an answer.
The violin responded immediately, the refrain repeating and then altering.
Freddy matched it, improvising to the changes.
And so the two instruments called to eachother for a time. Freddy played while walking around the solid trunk of the mainmast, head craned upward, trying to catch a glimpse of whoever was sending the haunting melody down to him.
Eventually, he caught a glimpse of movement far far up near the very top of the mast and, almost in a trance, he swung his guitar behind him and began to climb up the ratlines, as the violin music accompanied him.
She was waiting for him at the very top of the main mast, balancing impossibly on the tip of the top gallant spar, pirouetting gracefully as she played, impossible poise and balance. Weightless.
The moonlight shone through her, the form of a small, slight girl, semitransparent, colorless and ethereal. In stark contrast the violin she played was solid and crimson as heartsblood, seeming to glow faintly with it’s own light. All around her even fainter, dark figures of shadow danced to her tune. They were so faint Freddy could make out little but their general shapes, backlit by the stars and moonlight.
Freddy carefully pulled himself into the crows nest, well aware of the hundreds of feet of empty air that lay beneath his feet. He watched in awe as the specter (as she could only be) nimbly danced across the spar, and then with apparently no effort at all, leapt the thirty feet to the foremast spar across from him, landing with the grace of a cat.
The ghost paid him no attention whatsoever but the original refrain that had first caught his attention sounded out again. Freddy carefully unlimbered his guitar and resumed playing.
The rest of that night passed like a dream. The song was always the same, yet infinite in it’s variety, as guitar and violin entangled in the moonlight two hundred feet above a sea like glass.
She never so much as glanced at him or even came within a cables length of where Freddy was wedged in the crows-nest, instead dancing from spar to spar in the moonlight. The music went on and on.
Freddy lost all track of time, but eventually the rosy glow of the sunrise began to tinge the eastern sky, as the full moon began to set in the west. For a brief moment moonlight merged with dawnlight, and the world hung balanced between light and darkness.
As the sunrise glow touched the phantom girl, her music and movements began to take on urgency and the song shifted. Her form took on more solidity and the red violin’s strings and bow began to burn with a fiery light.
Freddy somehow found himself standing on the very tip of the mainmast, swaying with it’s motion as he faced the rising sun. It was impossible dangerous and foolhardy, his balance simply wasn’t this good, he was destined to fall at any moment, and yet he somehow felt no fear and had no problem maintaining the precarious perch.
His silver guitar strings also dripped with the same fire, the strings that had been gifted to him by the mysterious Endelyn Moongrave, the Fairie Queen of Bitter End. They burned brightly but were not consumed and did not burn his fingers. The music grew to it’s final crescendo as the first tip of the sun broke above the horizon.
As it’s rays touched them both, the form of the specter started to quickly fade into the rosy light of dawn. And the song reached its ending and faded as well.
“Wait!” Freddy cried out as she slipped away. “I don’t even know your name”
And faintly on the rising breeze he heard the merest whisper of a response.
“Jenny”
And she was gone.
As she vanished from sight and the last notes of the song faded away, the whole ship shuddered from end to end, bow to stern, spar-tip to spar-tip, like the shudder a man makes as he emerges from a long sleep.
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