Die Ravanche

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Die Ravanche

by Leanna Renee Hieber

(First Published in Castle of Horror Vol. 11: Revenge)

She carried the souls of the dead and she would come for those who had wronged them.

At least that’s what Greta had always been told. So, with that sweet promise in mind, the young woman had cried out for Die Ravanche with her dying breath.

Now Greta’s spirit waited for her ship to come in. It was just a matter of the right weather.

Tonight, the conditions were perfect. What would grow to a blinding white fog began accumulating, spreading its blanket thickly over dense forests and unforgiving layers of craggy rock, shredded fingernails of land reaching out to the unknown.

“The Revenge is coming!” whispered nervous townsfolk. As misty tendrils crept close, women lifted their skirts, scurrying back from the shoreline like rats clearing rising water. As residents retreated to higher ground in panic, Greta wafted towards the incoming haze.

It was all the tricks of sound that made this part of the northeast coast particularly uncanny. Murmurs were uttered far from Greta’s ear and yet they carried as if they were right upon her. The eerie acoustics along these fangs of rock meant that every sound was a ghost, a disembodied voice in the immediate while no silhouette was visible.

As the fog thickened, those whispers grew into cries.

It was no wonder people thought this coast was haunted, the sounds bouncing off ragged environs to land against the ear, fully disorienting the living and calling forth the dead.

Floating at the end of a wooden pier along a jagged patch of northern coastline that really ought not to have had a pier at all, Greta waited for the foretold. Her phantom pulse pounded in the memory of a heartbeat, out of a fond habit of rhythm. In her corporeal days, her heart used to race like the thunder of a thoroughbred’s hooves. A passionate creature on her best days, a fury on her worst, she was insatiable always. If there was a mandate for her soul to pass on somewhere sweet or someplace Acherontic, no one had led her onwards to any such eternal notion. All she knew now was that she floated, waited, and ravened.

Nothing but fog in any direction. If the living were to take one step too far forward, they’d find themselves cast into a watery depth impossible to gauge, or one step back could cast them off a precipice to dash against sharp rocks.

This was the kind of weather where it was only safe to be still.

That’s when the ghost ship docked.

A long black prow split through white, gauzy vapor.

Gasps surrounded Greta. The tricks of sound along these gashes of land meant she heard those who had gathered by the paltry whitewashed lighthouse and its clapboard cottage right at her ear. They all drew in their breath.

Everyone seemed eager to see a haunting until they actually did. Then they’d find reasons why they didn’t see what they saw. Just like the cruel excused their actions within a victim’s flaws. Greta had appeared to her killer before, refusing to be forgotten. He had dismissed her floating form as a mere nightmare. Perhaps he’d think twice about that tonight.

When the onyx prow pierced the fog like a lance, Greta found herself gasping, too. The schooner drifted silently into view and the lovingly painted letters noting Die Ravanche made their way across Greta’s vision; the German word for revenge drifted mere inches from her face as she hovered at the edge of the pier in anticipation.

Die Ravanche’s figurehead had once been a beautiful siren of a woman, but half of her was shorn off. Still, even below the top wooden layer, an artisan had taken the time to craft her bones and viscera. Her masthead mortality now laid bare, half torn, with a rib cage held just as proudly upright as her bosom, a grinning skull on the other side of her lovely face.

The ship’s gray sails were trimmed and slightly transparent. Her black hull, directly below her name, bore a wide gash. But it, too, shifted between solid and shade, as if the entire ship were a trick of the light and a sound that shouldn’t have carried.

With a grunt and a splash, an unfurling metal chain clattered down towards the water, carrying half the volume of what once would have roared.

“The Revenge has dropped anchor!” came a terrified whisper beside her. She turned and saw no one. The living villagers, huddled around the lighthouse’s base, must have heard the echoes of the ship’s routine, their horrified exclamations sounding as though they were the ghost right in front of her. But no, before her hovered Captain Albtraum. Avenging angel.  

“Ah, so we’re picking up today, not just dropping off?” boomed the tall, grayscale woman in boots, breeches, a brocade waistcoat, and a voluminous greatcoat. Long dark hair cascaded out from beneath an embroidered kerchief, waves of locks gathered into a loose braid over her shoulder, the tail of which was knotted around a shard of sharpened bone. She was luminous and floating, much like Greta, but her boldness gave her an opacity the other spirits on board lacked.

There were many souls aboard. Passengers had come to crowd the deck, a range of charcoal-colored bodies in an assortment of dress. Their silvery faces stared down at Greta impassively. None of them bore the signs of various violences done to them; just as Greta wore the simple linen dress she’d died in, her wounds had long ago wicked off her spectral form. Her memories, however, remained fresh.

“Yes . . . yes, ma’am,” Greta answered. “Permission to come aboard . . . Captain?”

“Captain Lorelei Albtraum at your service.” The captain reached out and grabbed Greta by the forearm, pulling her up and over the rail and onto the deck before releasing her.