Disclaimer: I own no part of Pirates of the Caribbean.

The Hanged Man

The fact that his coach could not be brought up close to the offices of the EITC was most inconvenient. It stood waiting, some forty yards from his office, and Lord Becket could never dispel the feeling of tension in his shoulders as he strode towards its protective embrace. The disapproving town was always watching him. Very well; let Port Royal understand that he was their superior, holding the reins of government with confidence and style. It was unlikely any were close enough to see the uneasy way he flicked his eyes from side to side.

An elderly woman in shabby dress ran toward him, forcing him to halt abruptly as she knelt in his path. The expression on her upturned face was ingratiating, and accolades were all too rare for him these days. Something to do with all the executions, no doubt. He waited to hear what she would say.

"A gift, yer lordship, from a poor woman." She held out what looked like a greasy playing card. "For luck, sir." There was a nasty, peculiar smell about her. Her face and hands were marked with soot, and the hem of her skirt had a ragged look as if the edge had been torn or burnt in places. He controlled his urge to recoil from her.

A few townsfolk were watching, enough that he felt obliged to accept the repulsive gift if only to show an icy grace in dealing with the lower orders. The woman beamed her thanks, then departed with furtive haste.

In his coach, he glanced at the card and saw that it was from a tarot deck. The Hanged Man. Insulting old hag. He would find out where she lived and invent some pretext to have his men throw her out on the street.

It was not until the evening that he noticed the card once more. He had tossed it upon his desk before involving himself in a number of commercial discussions with Mercer, but the grotesquerie of the thing intrigued him. There was something else the Hanged Man symbolised, but he could not recall it. Filthy looking card.

He put it in the fire and watched it burn.

He strolled over to his spyglass, and adjusted it to bring the town of Port Royal into focus. Not much to see in the moonlight. A slight refinement to its lens brought a familiar sight into view – the three hanged pirates whose corpses graced the entrance to the harbour. He savoured the sight, and imagined other pirates - indeed, all the enemies of the East India Trading Company - displayed thus.

Behind him there was a cough and shuffling of feet. He turned. Mercer was there, pulling a document from his clerk's folder. "Sorry; need to have ye sign one more."

Becket took the document and prepared to sign it. "You might know this, Mercer. I've just been trying to recall what the Hanged Man's meant to symbolise in a tarot deck – beyond an execution, I mean."

He wrote his name with a flourish, followed by the date, thirty-first October, 1741.

Mercer frowned. "The crossroads, I think." Then he volunteered an odd bit of information. "Back home, the bolder folk went to the crossroads at midnight on Hallowe'en – it was said ye could hear the hanged men whisperin' the names of those who would die in the comin' year."

The bolder folk? Becket pictured goggle-eyed villagers daring each other to stand closer to the gallows to hear the prophecies of the dead. Simpletons, mired in pathetic old customs from an ignorant past.

He hid his smile beneath a feigned yawn as he handed back the document. "Dreary, Mercer. Very dreary. All that way in the dead of night? If I wanted to speak to a dead man, I'd make him come to me." A sudden crisp rustle and shower of sparks came from the fireplace.

After Mercer departed, the house was still and empty. Governor Swann was snug in a cell, the daughter gone . . . the servants? He rang before he remembered; they were given the night off, since half of them would have pleaded deathly illness anyway. All Hallows' Eve.

He turned to the table. The tiny figures arranged on the map gave him a sense of omnipotence. Little militias, tiny sailing ships, diminutive artillery. He let his eyes drift over each sector. There was something to be said for knowing the exact shape of the world and your place in it.

"Behold the future," he said to the empty room, waving his hand over the map table.

A noise outside the door made him jump. It might have been a floorboard cracking, or a footstep. He paused. Footstep or floorboard? Open the door and find out. Why should he feel so strangely reluctant to settle the question? But he remained where he was. Perhaps one of the servants was still in the house.

In fact, that explanation seemed to be corroborated when he heard another sound, a distinct step, in the room overhead. He waited, but there was nothing more. Surely the squeak of the door would follow? But either he had imagined the step, or the occupant of the room above was keeping perfectly still.

An uncomfortable notion.

Fiddlesticks. He hadn't heard any step.

He settled down to work that evening, but his concentration was disrupted on more than one occasion by the most damnable whispering. As soon as he tried to discover its source, it would cease, only to resume from another corner when he had just begun to concentrate on business once again.

At last he gave up. As he contemplated whether the fire needed attention, he gradually became aware that it was the source of the whispering sounds. Undoubtedly they were caused by gusts of the October wind, trapped somewhere in the chimney flue. Still, one couldn't help discerning something like words. Words that sounded like names.

He listened. Jamessss . . Norrrrinngton. Wthbeee Swaaaahnnnnn. Then a long "whoosh" that sounded like yoooouuuu. The chimney breathed in, and another sigh of air came to his ears. Merccccccer.

After a few more moments of listening, he realised that the wind must have died down. He was relieved no one had seen him sitting there, quite still, straining his ears to hear more. This was rubbish – the empty house was getting on his nerves.

He took a candle with him and retired upstairs to the rooms that had formerly belonged to Weatherby Swann. As soon as he had sent Swann to gaol, he had set up house in the Governor's Mansion, taking the finest suite for himself. He hesitated at the door. The phantom step he heard from the library would have come from this very room. He entered the room and looked in each corner. Nothing was disturbed; the room was neat as a pin.

He changed into his nightshirt, and found that he was staring at the extra spyglass he had set up near the window. How could Swann have thought that one such item in the house was sufficient? What could be more engrossing than to view one's little kingdom from a sort of Olympian perspective, no matter the day or time?

He had been looking at the hanged pirates on Gun Cay earlier – he would have one last look before bed. Of course, to make a proper display, one needed to hang them in chains, not ropes, so as to prevent the rotted bodies from falling to bits. He frowned and focused the lens.

And in fact, the wisdom of using chains seemed to prove itself at once. He could only see two bodies and an empty noose. One corpse appeared to be missing. He tried again. Perhaps the third body was obscured by a wisp of evening fog? He stepped away from the spyglass to scan the horizon, but the night was clear. It must have fallen from the ropes. There was no need for the growing feeling of unease that crept slowly up from his chest.

He shut and locked the window, blew out the candle, and went to bed. A good night's sleep would fortify his spirits and banish these nonsensical fancies. He drifted off thinking of the work to be done in the morning.

He did not think he had slept many hours when a gust of air across his face awakened him in the dark. It was impossible to guess the time, but dawn must be far away. His arm reached out, feeling for the candle on the bedside table, but somehow it toppled, and the next sound was the clatter of candle and tinder box hitting the floor. Damn.

He sighed and lay still for a moment; then he heard it. There was a soft noise from the direction of the window. He could not identify this sound. It might have been a bird's claw scratching the glass, or the tip of a branch, though he could not remember seeing any trees planted so close to the house.

The noise sounded again, clearer this time. It was not a bird; someone was just outside his window, clawing their way up the wall. He received a further shock when he looked at the window and found it open. He distinctly remembered securing it from the inside. And where were the Company soldiers assigned to protect him?

Carefully, he reached out once more. His pistol, loaded and primed, still lay on the table. He picked it up and slid out of the bed on the side furthest from the window. Hands shaking, throat dry, he waited for the intruder.

What looked at first like the legs of a very large crab appeared on the window sill. Becket blinked his eyes several times. Was he dreaming? Very slowly he realised that he was staring at a skeletal hand – one that moved. Each scratching, scrabbling noise the creature made caused him to grip the pistol tighter. He could not run – he was frozen in place, teeth clenched, shaking. Another hand, then the skull appeared.

Becket raised his pistol with a palsied arm. The skull seemed to rotate from side to side, as if looking for something. Then it fixed its vacant eye sockets upon him – and it spoke. A name. His name.

Becket did not remember hearing his pistol go off. When he came to his senses the next day, he was lying in bed, and Dr Choake was just preparing to leave. Pleased to see his patient returning to normal, the doctor explained that Becket's men had been startled last night by the sound of a shot from the house, and had run to his aid.

He had been found, according to Dr Choake, unconscious on the bedroom floor with the pistol at his side. The shot had shattered the pane of his window, which they examined. The window had been closed and locked.

They sent for Mercer, who had tried to speak with him, but he had been too shaken to give his clerk an account of himself. Becket watched the doctor's face, and suspected that he was not disclosing everything. As soon as he left, Becket called for Mercer.

Mercer entered the room with a wary look in his eyes, but he was able to fill in all the details Becket required.

Being a thorough man, Mercer had inspected the area below the window by lantern light, but found no sign of intrusion. However, when morning came, one of the guards had called Mercer back to the spot. The guard had pointed out a macabre sight – some loose bones still in pirate's rags, and a skull that was missing a large portion of its cranium.

"But we knew whose it was," said Mercer, as Becket's face assumed a sickly cast. "Ye could tell by the belt buckle. 'Twas George Perkins, that was hanged for piracy a year ago yesterday. You might remember – his mother was the old hag that told fortunes in town. She cursed everyone in the courtroom at his trial."

A vague memory tugged at Becket. No, it couldn't be. A woman in a ragged skirt . . . "What happened to the mother?" he asked, as fear worked an icy finger down his back.

Mercer shrugged. "She was taken and burned as a witch soon after."