Smokey…moist…fog leads
Hornblower to a carcass of a ship wedged firmly in the teeth of harbour shoals,
its flag of Portugal, now shredded and shrivelled in the shallow salivating
water that feasted on it.
Then, like a deep sea diver,
Hornblower finds himself exploring the bowels of the shipwreck, and discovers
four made tidy beds; each bed has a sterile sheet concealing a body of
presumable a dead man. Above the head of each bed reads a tombstone:
Clayton – 1762 – 1794,
Eccleston – 1760 –1795, Simpson 1760 – 1795, Kennedy – 1776 – 1795.
Against instinct, Hornblower
pulls back the cover of Kennedy’s bed…and recoils in disgust. No body lieth
there. Instead, there are hundreds of maggots crawling over the remains of the
rotting Portuguese flag.
“So, you have come to find my
body” says a voice behind him.
Hornblower swings round to
find Kennedy dressed in angelic white. A crown of thorns adorns his skull.
“Welcome to purgatory” the voice says.
The hairs on the back of
Hornblower’s neck stand on end as an icy chill vertebrates down his spine. “My
God – Kennedy?!” he gasps. Yet the apparition doesn’t have the same reassuring
voice of Kennedy.
This figure who looks like
Kennedy reveals his arms from behind his back. In his right hand he is holding
an apple. In his left hand he is holding a serpent. Hornblower to his horror
notices his left hand is adorned with a skull and crossbones tattoo – identical
to the one Simpson had.
“Which do you choose to eat
Bartholomew?” prompts the phantom. “The apple or the serpent?”
How bizarre, thinks
Hornblower. He knows my middle name. What’s even more bizarre, as Hornblower
now realises, is that this figure with the head of Kennedy and the hands of
Simpson also has the voice of…Simpson!
Hornblower is too terrified
to speak, but is inclined to want the apple. The phantom, as though reading his
thoughts, gives him the apple. As soon as Hornblower touches the apple it turns into a serpent and unleashes
its poisonous fangs. Hornblower releases the serpent with a mighty jerk before
realising the fog has lifted and now he is teetering at the edge of a cliff.
Hornblower looks down and observes the twisted bodies of several hundred dead
men, many naked and others enclosed in armour.
The spectre with the head of
Kennedy laughs wickedly like Simpson as the ground under Hornblower’s feet
begins to crumble rapidly, until Hornblower loses his footing and finds himself
plunging head first to his death….falling sharply until a sudden shudder wakes
him up from this nightmare.
It takes him a few moments to
register he is seeing the face of Styles smiling down at him.
“Mr Hornblower Sir” whispers
Styles “Mr Hunter asks you to come on deck Sir.”
What a bizarre dream, thinks
Hornblower, but there is no time to analyse it. In that one brief moment as he
lumbers from the hammock, he laments the death of his good friend, Archie
Kennedy.