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Poor Will, exiled to the Great Beyond, doing a job he's not quite trained for, living with people he doesn't quite like. At least the Great Beyond isn't all boring. A little too un-boring, come to think of it, what with tetchy goddesses and storms and giant fish . . .


Captain Turner and the Organ

They missed the music.

That impossible beast, the pipes that stretched through three decks' height, all gleaming brass, nickel, and mahogany now that it was no longer more seamount than instrument, still brooded below, the lungs and throats of a platoon of avenging angels waiting to groan, or trumpet, or rail, or sigh and whisper wistfully of lost years, but they waited long and silent, for their player was dead.

The pipes gave a sudden squawk, startling the men reefing the main topgallant.

Woken and working, but miserably so, the organ shrieked out a long whistle like an angry hummingbird, before slowly dropping, step by step, note by note in a grating twelve-note scale, down the two-hundred-odd keys all the way to the quaking bass pipes as wide as a man's torso, pipes that whales mistook for the lowest grunts of their kind. The men on the mainmast gritted their teeth as the spar vibrated under their arms. Miles away, a school of herring shimmered and fled.

"Somebody give us a shanty," someone called.

They hardly recognized each-other, since the ship had been reborn, and them with it. This man had thin whiskers, and had taken to calling himself Gilbert Coombs. The wind gusted, flaring the sail as they bound it to the spar, but the men on deck heard and took up the cry.

"A shanty!"

"Joe give us a song?"

"For God's sake, get the demmed squealin' outa me ear-holes!"

The men groused back and forth, until finally they began to wonder, "Does no-one know any?"

Captain Jones had not taken kindly to singing.

They stared around at each-other, until one of the newer crew remembered an old tune. A very old tune, from long before he'd even seen the sea.

He sang threadily, his voice hesitant and chalk-soft, eyes screwed shut in concentration.

"Hush ye, my bairnie
Bonny wee dearie
Sleep! come and close the een
heavy and wearie
Closed are the wearie een..."

"No, ya loony! Sing sommat ta work to!" Gilbert bellowed.

The singer trailed off, seeing the others stare at him in annoyance. "It's all I've got."

The organ roared, sounding a hundred notes at once, nearly blasting the men on the topgallant from their perches. The noise drove on, huge and steady and utterly tuneless, featureless, ceaseless. Exasperated, Gilbert gaped at his fellows. "What's Cap'n doin, takin a nap on the bloody keys?"

Captain Turner was not lying on the keys. He had instead set a spare plank over the keyboard and weighted it with sand bags, emptying every gasp of wind from the bellows into the pipes. The din in the organ room was incredible. He had one arm wrapped around his head to cover his ears, while with the other he patted down his pockets and turned the room over for something to stuff in them. There was a hymnal inside the music bench. He ripped the front page out and wadded it into earplugs, then went below for a ladder. A ladder, a marlinespike, a hammer, a pot of oil, perhaps…

Meanwhile, the organ railed, the air whooshing from the tops of the pipes like a giant's breath, a giant being kicked again and again in the chest by a giant ox.

Life under Jones had been hell, but after a year or so without him, the crew had found themselves slightly nostalgic. "Old Davy was a scary cuss," one of the men might say, "but he only had two kinds of moods—sulky and ornery. And he let you know what's what." Turner had moods, which he tried, and for the most part, failed, to keep firmly under his bandana, cycling through hope and resolve and impatience and worry and bewilderment and existential anguish. He was confusing. Despair went a long way in making a man predictable, and Turner did not have despair.

He also entirely lacked Captain Jones' sense of grandeur, at best an embarrassment and at worst obstructive. In a hard storm above water, with the rain whipping into their eyes and sheeting down thick enough to hide the topsails, or in dense murk below when they sailed blind through blizzards of mud relying only on their captain's untrained sea sense to keep them from striking bottom, it was hard to pick him out from the sailors because he didn't wear a hat.

The crew had lost pride.

Under Jones, they had been less than men and more than men—they lived with horrors, they themselves were horrors, and nothing short of the Captain himself could ever cow or horrify them. Now they were a raggle-taggle of refugees from death, scrapped together from different decades, portless, unpaid, without a proper work shanty among the score of them. Before, they had heaved-ho to the despairing strains of the pipe organ, the soul's cry of the captain thrumming through the ship in magnificent agony. It was sad, dreadfully so, but its voice made sadness sweet, and it was impossible, too: what ship but the Flying Dutchman could spare two decks' height to such extravagance? What other ship was its own cathedral of damnation?

Now they had Will Turner poking around the thing—literally poking it, as though it surprised him when it made noise.

Thirty minutes later, they guessed, the organ stopped screaming.


Chapter 1 of a completed story. Man, this was in the works a long time. At first, it was just going to be about what Will does to the organ.

If anything is confusing, this is probably because I like to assume all readers have psychic powers and can decipher my subtlest intentions from vague references alone. So it's probably my fault, not yours, and it would be wonderful of you to tell me when something doesn't make sense.