(№1.3)

Exactly a dozen and a third thereof skeletons were laying perfectly still on the  sand, the skin and flesh impressively peeled back, some shreds of flesh desperately clinging still to the owner of the  bone, yet absolutely with nothing left, nothing to indicate the characters, the living, breathing specimens of before hours they were with desires, and wishes and a family, nothing more but objects, the size and vague remembrance of the human race.

The pink hue of flesh and tinted bones of blood with only some protruding parts decked in frosty, pure white seemed too devastating in the morning, too real to be true, horror and trauma, hitting right where the shamble-like companionship of humanity sat to abhor their own people be cleansed and cleaned like fish or cattle, moronic, lesser animals when they thought to be more of.

Such violence, such horrible crime couldn't be allowed to be shown in blinding light, revealing, truthful, rosy-fingered, humble dawn which made it much too truthful.

They only recognized them gruesomely thanks to the clothes of their own they were wearing that the evil culprits had the audacity to put back on after they committed such horrible crime, such intrusion of privacy and human dignity. Well, they prayed at least for the matching to irrevocably bind owner to true clothes, and have them not, in fact, mixed up to intensify and bring upon other horrors of despair, for they would never distinguish their respectable loved ones for who they were, stripped of skin and flesh and bled dry, eye sockets held in judgmental shade, as if the skeletons were cursing family and friends for their terrible, pathetic end of perishing in deliberate pain and suffering.

Grossly, laying immovably exactly in the middle of the long row, the man with the longest femur, proudest vertebrae and straightest spine, the man in the past claiming to be their leader, claiming to protect his subjects under the name of the respectable king and church further inland, their conceited and deferential ruler, their invincible saviour and protector of the town, had his skull pierced with a long stick, unlike everyone else, further disgracing the ego and status of the people to the very edging end, threads confined in suitable livery glinting in the newly risen sun as wit and strength once contemplated in his ember eyes.

Not only a stick though, it was in fact a flag .

The flag imprinted with a weird foreign instrument, counting many, many vertical, thin cords, held in the devilish colours black and red with golden embellishments.

For blood and darkness. And the gold marking the divine ruthlessness, the audacity they were possessed of to misuse and spit on the heavenly colours of light and paradise itself, when they opened and embraced the gates of hell.

It was them, it could only be.

What other strangers, frightened and hesitant to show their faces upon arrival, had shortly arrived at this very bay, to feast and spoon sacrilegious tones and paint them sinners for inviting, beckoning the demons to poison their hearts and minds with brewing, growling seduction and temptation. They failed, collectively realised in crestfallen contempt, once given into the fantasy and turned their backs onto reality and the plan of an austere life, cut out of pleasure and any joy.

The weird ship-creatures from last night did this to punish them, for unrealizable reasons.

Maybe not for a reason at all.

The village people cried briefly and sobbed for three days straight to honour their deceased, then burning the intruded evil, the stain of mutinous disharmony, penetrating out of the bones of their loved once, all on a public pyre near the beach they were found object and still, cooled and taken from monsters.

The most ludicrous, chilling part dawned only later, when dressed in the darkest nuance of black apparel, mourning the lost, already gone for weeks without end, a masked dome of sorrow and woe encircling the village thick and indestructible, with no means to terminate, that they figured with gnawing horror, what overcame them the very first time to step foot on that cursed beach  how screams were used to lure them in, horrifying yells from a living throat, muttered and dispersed with hot breath and tears running down to beg for mercy. The march was steep and insidious to enter the shared border of Land and Sea, for protected by staggering walls of paramount rock, allowing to listen to the constant clutching and lolling of waves, but tediously having to run around it for a maximal ten minute stroll. Those reasons emanating to believe the culprits left the crime scene in hurry and thrilling possibility of getting caught and only minutes ago, before the storming crowd of brutes and those yearning for their blood would have arrived.

That was when it all begun, the story, the tale, the thrilling legend of the Skeleton Crew was born due to the doled saga of denouncing even the loveliest creature breathing to a profaned skeletal form and apocalypse and horrid horror they would carry wherever they'd sail and anchor next, bound to terminate, destroy, mark the quietus of life just as displayed in form of skeletons natural buried humans would undergo, bones the end of their final era with no cling perceived to be remembered, mortal remains scattered and swimming on the surface of the sea where else the Crew would strike next.

The next village they passed was granted with the gift of complete extinguish, as one night after the Crew passed the shore, illuminating in their usual blue brilliant light, breaking the weak horizon of people's mind, playing their morbid, abhorrent songs, a horrible storm came upon them the very next day and destroyed their houses, waves lured people into the sea, to have toys to eagerly play with, the Crew looking afar finding comfort in the masses of drowned and miserable people, none alive to warn and whisper to others, what they'd achieve, what they do next. And that was one of the few times they dimmed in the confines of the caring shadows, a smile.

They were called many things, over time.

The Foreteller of Death was a famous one, or simply the Destructor Ship, Harbinger of demise a close second one, but people really grew fond of the name "Skeleton Crew" and it just stuck, accepted cooly and distantly even from the very creatures cursed and desecratedly turned in many mouths and muttered even too wispy and soft when the sun stood high, tall, when the Skeleton Crew would not even come, rather a myth than fact, a tale spun around and marvelled, wondered at, engaged only heavily in sweet dreams what their music as a price would sound in mortal ears and alike in nightmares with bloodied rain and lurching skeletons crawling out of the grave, still Sea to come for the living, the victims of the Crew itself revulsed to tear more bodies in the tomb that was the Sea.

The villagers in general felt and opined how the horrible creatures living on deck and thriving on their losses, ravishing and ravenous, preferred the name above all and quite enjoyed it to be frightened, feared, subconsciously integrated in every conversation and silent glances, adored to be monsters.

Yes, every time they passed and produced contents of eden and ethereal blueness lit the white-lined Sea ablaze, revealing the vigorous immortality of broadening, unforgiven waters, worse over and sickening, the villagers felt their presence literally. They were in the air, in the sea, in the clouds, formless shapes in the dark, behind every tree, in every crown of a lake, in a mug of bear and in hidden whispers.

But mostly, in the music. Every beat, every rhythm, they were there. They might be here.

The poor people felt it deep in their bones, a constant reminder of how pleased the Crew was with every single one of their punishments and happy to return repeatedly to let them suffer once anew, forget the reasoning at all, no. Someone so viciously could only do it out of mere boredom, with an unbeaten, cold, black heart, disposed of soul and reason, killing simply out of leisurely delight.

They felt them smirking and thriving on their pain and over time felt ire and anger fueling heated violence, melting icy fear clamouring their hearts to a little pool, now filled with rage at how easily they, the humans, conquered species, queens and kings over the animal kingdom, could be fooled, taken for morons and how undeniably it even worked.

Once as they sailed the third time to a City once known and grown to be famous New York, playing their horrible and gleeful tunes stilled with readied victory and brazen satisfaction, a few men decided that it would be the least of their morbid concerts feeding into disaster. They were tired and had enough to be dominated by a bunch of phantom ghosts, cowards, they named them over beer and wine with which they hoped to grasp courage and heroism, so half an hour ticked away already after the ship let itself appear, let itself be seen, six sinewy and huge, hulk-like men took a naughty and firm boat, formed like a haughty nutshell and probably enclosing to be as stable, and approached the blue glowing ship with suppressed ugly laughter and greedy tinkling eyes, starved for a fight.

People came to see and wonder what would happen, who those malefic and malignant people in truth were, buying them morons, thinking them daft, slitting the throats of twelve radiant and beautiful children of their own only last autumn, golden leaves carefully sealing mouths shut so they bled dry silently, eyes glassy and faces drenched in tears and smothered sobs, for the women and men to find stiff sprawled limbs drawn with carnage, the next morning.

The women and children whose husbands or fathers went to combat and elucidate with these vile specimens were comforted by the biggest group of people, patting their arms in anticipation and pity.

It betide long centuries after the glorious and pioneering epoch of enlightenment, with wonders amiss and demons gladly shoved into existential grounds of void, science explaining and daring now even the trickiest and most difficult verity to be stripped barren and prodded by the scalpels and knives of prying men. They believed the Skeleton Crew to be a mere bunch of rude and hideous strangers playing pirates on them, blood-lusting now having picked the apparent wrong city, for the men took it on them to put them back into their places, what hell-hole they crawled from, to emerge the victorious and wondrous heroes, saviours of New York. Their perfectly-figured out, narrow Earth offered no place, clinically cut and constructed, for legends and mythology, monsters and demons, unknowing how the Skeleton Crew had sailed the seven oceans long before Europeans discovered the sliver, glimpse of a new world and they'd do so long after their descendants had reunited with the dirt.

Those men comprehended none of the danger they willingly would face.

The playing did not stop in fact, even though the men had arrived at the bodice of the ship and whole-heartedly had smartly figured out how to come on deck via an old, slightly rotten and gruel-eaten roped ladder.

The people, over the hollowing and loud playing, could hear the emotions switching from just one second to the other:

Normally, they only disguised a hint of evil and bursted confidence in their songs and the swelling theme of regret and pain as an afterthought, but the villagers were not to hear that, however now some change could be made out.

Curiosity swung in the last strophe of their song and the slighting, apprehensive wait of a predator, when prey was arriving, but mostly, they were also curious, what would happen next.

Even the villagers – mostly – feared if the strongest of their ranks succeeded to beat the creatures at their own game, managing to come home alive and breathing, the consequences still would prob a price too exorbitant to pay and the extinction of the ship would only be the beginning.

I can smooth their wrinkled foreheads and amounted brows that no human might even so much as challenge the Skeleton Crew the slightest and the folk should not fear for their survival...

The bright, pale moon – conveniently, it's said to have happened - firmly provided light to their losing attempt to reveal the truth of the Mystery of the Skeleton Crew. Moonlight would bring other truths one night, one day, but it wouldn't be tonight.

The men struggled to hop over the railing and collided with the deck punctuated with an engendered thumping sound ringing succession, standing on the ship of the residing dead, as no mortal had done for a very long time and trod with caution, the crinkles of their weathered faces, contortions of nose, mouth, brows lighted azure from beneath, smacking them with a ghostly appearance, before spotting the wild group of their friends and family on the cliff and waving and winking wildly and with joy, winking and dancing as they would have already won, someone even grabbing the minuscule, famed blue lantern and playfully joked with it around.

The crowd cheerfully applauded as no one had done at the morbid concerts of the Skeleton Crew for a long time and cheered and cried happy tears that so on, their experiment had proven successful. Men of science, advancing in front and exploring new territories. Laughter would soon delinquent to anxiety and fright, and courage and lust deflagrate into nothing, for they had already chiselled their names on their tombstones now unknowingly.

Yet the moon disappeared behind a cloud – as it didn't wish to shed light for what was going to happen, the revealing, ghastly moon confidentially shielding right when the music halted abruptly and when the music stopped, weird things tended to happen. Death broadened as a portable beverage and avenged would be the insolence to insult the Skeleton Crew and dangle with ignorance and denial handled for the iniquity committed. The halo of azure died down encircling everything in gloomy unbeknownst and terrifying gloom.

It was immaculately perilous when the music went on for hours, a lullaby spelling the villagers to a restless, haughty sleep before the evil within would be discovered the next, yet it's equally hazardous when the concert is abruptly concluded and the ship sails the other way, a philosopher of this epoch once dared to muse, but not even this smart man could come behind the secrets, the enigma that was the Skeleton Crew. They appreciated all the pondering and headaches though, dedicated to their cause.

But the secret stayed hidden and intact, for no one to figure.

And so no one did.

And those who did, were never going to see the sunlight ever again anyway.

The crowd focused, squinted, worried about the sudden lack of light, but couldn't see a thing on deck, besides the blue lantern, shimmering on.

And then even this flickering beacon of luxury would be bereft, for the lantern was extinguished also.

Then they waited in anticipation for screams and cries and howls and growls produced out of the gaping mouths of their men and flesh-lusting groans from the attackers, the monsters residing, how their men would throw themselves into the calm sea at night and swim back with trauma on their mind and the story of history to tell. But nothing happened.

Or even their spend blood painting the waters crimson and their corpses floating abroad.

None of these things happened. It remained calm and still on the sea.

Too still.

Tonight, the Skeleton Crew gave an awfully, nerve-splintering concert of only sweet, eternal silence paired with gripping darkness – and the animated fantasy of the villagers what lay within.

The crowd stayed until dawn when the ship had already gone long unnoticed.

One time, they'd convinced themselves under hurried heart beats and holding one's breath for probably too long along, for too many hours, they could still see the fading, hidden outline of the dark wooden ship, circled in the dimmest blue, yet no one dared to go look.

They waited days after the concert, creeping, standing reluctant near the beach where the strongest and mightiest of them seemingly vanished into thin air, but nothing turned to tell the truth.

Not a much worser catastrophe, a horrid misfortune, disaster bestowed upon or winged lanes of fire pouring right from the sky, no, nothing of the unusual happened or was out of place, besides the consuming, condemning memories and the consistent plaguing of only horrible images, stocking sleep paralysis and reckoning about the fates of the six lost men and what those demons had done. It was irrevocable spoken truth that no human could have been able to muster the strength of flaunting, oozing muscle, possessed by the once friendly behemoths of the town.

It took them a week to understand that, in fact, they had not slipped over the unforgiving fog of clouding sanction and punishment overcoming and asphyxiating like sand with every visit, but how the real retribution lay in the torment of wait, being kept perpetually on your toes expecting woe and doom, whilst simultaneously praying and weeping for the end of those men, certainty to what had happened to them, targeted specifically to the families and a reminder on the village to never do so again, to never cross that threshold ever, even consider it, begging for a safe path to paradise leastwise, for it crystallised only farther how the outrageous devils had brutally rid the earth of those men, husbands, friends, fathers, sons, warriors and made it hence a voider space.

By that time, such wild stories were known all over every continent, vested with the one or other spin to feign near invincibility studded with more pieces of intricate lore, save no one exactly knew what the Skeleton Crew was capable of besides the actual members of the Crew.

What they would do next, or why they even did anything of the nefarious sorts, was a mere topic for heated speculation, sooner avoided discussion to outright quietude.

The real suffering this time now would only lay at the bounds and grounds of their fantasy and picture-painting tales, for they'd never know what really happened to them, so it was all on their erring, when they revised in pictures of their chest cavity violently ripped open to shreds, blood exploding through the air, staining their tunics and skin far beyond cleansing, a single rip delicately dangling out of the gaping hole with a once beating heart as a boon right at the very end of the tunnel, greedily devoured by monsters with talons for nails and eyes hugely alien like, entirely black and without light but the glint of sheer lunacy, staring out of these blue hues they tried to conceal themselves with. Their bodies, torn apart bit by bit, cut into pieces easily fitting in any tea cup, the air streaked red and reeking of metal and the stench of human bowels, glassy eyes piercing things without focus and never seeing still, orbs once waking every day to birdsong and shuffling noises of a household, eyes witnessing the birth of their children and gazing contently at the ocean.

Whatever they did to them couldn't be crueller than what people imagined they actually did. And that was the beauty in it. Not knowing would rip them apart slowly and drive them mad as a bonus.

They heard their laughs in their heads, felt their tainted smirks on their skin and shuddered at the dirtying sensations, even though they could be a thousand nautical miles away.

But that was the magic, wasn't it?

The entire affair, the legendaries and myth about a blue ship, sailing from harbour to harbour in the gloomy hollow of the night, the concert and finest music of all time might not even be real, a foul, playing trick of fatigue and longing for mystery and glamour, where their daily, structured lives lacked it all, caused by too much sea foam and seaweed, the rotten winds of the sea an alluring drug, working because they wanted it desperate to work, only washed, grey memories to prove as evidence.

The bringer of Death and Destruction slowly became the most famous story to tell kids at bedtime, in different variations of course, concerning the complexion, the toilette of the members themselves.

Some people thought they might be real Skeletons in the attire of pirates and sea rats hiding or sleeping during the day, and wake with the rise of the moon and the setting of the mothering sun, at night to be the judge and chastiser of mankind.

Others believed them to be the servants of Death himself – the most powerful God – and only followed his awful orders, being victims themselves, subdued by a terrible, terrible curse.

A few villagers tend to imagine that it might be something as benign as a bunch of wild humans, driven insane by time and playing tricks and artifice on the civilised and honest people to lure them to hell, whose tenuous voice they could comprehend at last, carrying them away from their beloved salvation. 

People also tend to be wrong, uttermost in these contingent times, as they are far freer and more ancient, and older than mankind could imagine or daring to remember, mouthed stories from old and fissured tongs, contributed in their youth and brushed off by their busy parents.

Together, it binds the cruel composition, the hymn, the Mystery or rather the Ballad of the Skeleton Crew to be exact.

A legend no one dared to explore, yet happening and occurring repeatedly. Explored lest in no further ways than to go about fantasy and unfixed fiction, speaking actually of rather falsehood than candour.

A thing that maybe doesn't need the confirmation of our everyday science as you can make up some reasonable explanation in that matter anyway.

One might even argue that no one in our days ever claimed to make such acquaintance, followed by a colossal plague, even though it might be all traced back to their blue, malicious scripture.

And who knows for sure, after all they might still be sailing the seven seas, yes, even in our modern days, unseen by human eyes, reader, and you may not be so reprieved than you think you are.

Moving and making their way towards new victims in constant effervescing.

You might even believe now that there's nothing, no reason at all, but I might choke on your expressed silliness, these words without coherent thought.

Only because people can't hear them or see them, might mean they are not out there.

Until today, unbeaten and grimly, everlasting and continuous, they could arrive at new shores – close to be possibly seen, but not too close – playing their foretelling melodies.

Of course it's on the humans to listen and understand the warning of evil brought upon within.

Their secret was safe for now, until it wasn't, it wouldn't be, that is.