Even captains who have made pacts with Lucifer and rule the ocean with a merciless claw need beauty sleep occasionally. Davy Jones usually fell asleep in front of his organ, exhausted by the emotion he'd thrown into playing it.

He dreamt something damp and sinuous crawled out of one of the pipes, dragged itself over and laid its dripping head on his lap. Its tendrils of wet hair fell like a blindfold across the face, which somehow made it more terrifying. At this point he was not aware he dreamt and in his dream he started. In waking life, he would have swiftly drawn his sword and killed it before he knew what it was, but in dreams all things are possible and all dreamers are helpless before the possibilities.

It sat up properly and Davy Jones saw it was a woman- to be precise, the woman he'd had killed earlier that monstrous night, and to be more precise it turned out she was a girl. She could not have been more than fourteen and a half, and there was a certain quality to her exposed white wrists and ankles, visible beneath her sodden dress, that suggested she had recently endured a growth spurt, a quality that could be likened to joints kept in protective shackles for countless years then suddenly freed, unprotected. He also saw she had very strongly defined cheekbones that changed the contour of her head into something triangular, and her eyes were very wide and a misty, uncompromising gray, set far apart in her head. Cheekbones and eyes combined gave her a perturbing resemblance to his hammerhead first mate, and initially he was a little worried he had put to death some relative of said sailor, but he looked closer and saw that the girl had a fine film of freckles totally covering her skin, and concluded they could not possibly be related. He finally noted a thick red line running across her throat, which still seeping fresh blood occasionally into the hollow of her clavicle. It was then he realised he was dreaming, and he seemed to relax.

Some time appeared to pass. Davy Jones realised the girl had asked a question, though he could not remember hearing her voice. Her accent arrived in his short-term memory as entirely neutral.

She repeated herself. "What is your name?"

All tentacles curled into angry shapes. He narrowed his eyes. "I am the sea," he hissed.

She shrugged. "Are you classically trained, Mr The Sea?"

"What!" he thundered more than asked.

"I take that to be a no." She reached inside her dress and extracted a book, which sea-water and blood had destroyed beyond hope of repair. "Horace," she said, waving it. "A Roman lyric poet. This is his first book of Odes."

"I care not for the simperings of a dead man who knew more about metre than he did about life," spat Davy Jones.

"You should listen carefully," she replied calmly, "and I'll read to you the English translation of Ode 5, since the Latin won't be anything but garbled goobledegook to you."

Before he could interrupt her a second time, she began to read aloud in a deeply thrilling voice that could no way belong to her:

"What slim boy, drenched in liquid perfumes, embraces you, Pyrrha, amongst many roses deep inside your welcoming grotto? For whom do you, simple in elegance, tie up your honey-gold hair?"

She stopped. "That is the first verse," she said. "Discuss."

Davy did not answer for some time. There was a strange silence in the darkness, devoid even of the cruel whisper of the sea. When he did answer, it was at a resigned mutter: "Damn yer corpse and the clothes on its back."

She waited. Her shoulders jumped with childish impatience but her eyes were disturbingly tranquil.

Finally he said, "I thought this wouldn't be another dream about... her."

"Her?" the girl said, like a fish leaping onto the hook, quick as a flash.

"Honey-gold hair," Davy said glumly. "Beautiful, beautiful strands, like the hangman's noose. And roses." He shuddered deeply, every tentacle writhing. "She- she liked roses."

"You were a slim boy," the girl suggested, but Davy had clammed up, lost in some reverie that sent his smooth, slimy face twitching.

The girl lay a white, wet hand on his claw. He barely seemed to notice, though he did not push her away. The girl asked him, with hypnotic monotony, "What is your name?"

Oh no, he thought, please, don't tell me we're going to start from the beginning.

"Davy Jones," he said, to break the cycle.

"Ah," she said, a smile suddenly flooding her cold countenance. "Welsh, are you?"

Before he could snap at her, the sleep fled from his mind, the scene dissolved and he awoke again in the perfect darkness of misery.