Jim Morgan and the Pirates of the Black Skull Read Free Page B

home. He raised his wooden sword once more and shouted with joy into the air. But no sooner had his call faded than the warm sea breeze turned cold. It stole the cry from Jim’s lips and pricked his cheeks with icy needles. A shiver crawled down his back as he turned to look behind him.
    Dark clouds, blacker than burnt paper, boiled on the horizon. They bled across the sky like a spreading stain. Lightning flicked forked tongues at the cloud’s edges, bursting in purple flashes. Crimson tendrils wormed through the cracks and folds, rivulets of burning red in the dark.
    It was a storm - yet this was no mere summer squall. As Jim watched the unfolding thunderheads roll toward the bay, he knew inhis heart that there was something unnatural about them. Jim had seen too much magic to miss its smell, or its feel.
    Thunder clapped like a door blown open by the wind, and Jim flinched in his boat. The sea quaked and frothed. Black clouds, rimmed with red, devoured the sky and the sun, swallowing them whole. Darkness descended upon the bay and a cold wind chilled Jim to the bone. But a cold, icier still, gripped him when he turned about in his boat. He found himself no longer alone.
    A man’s form melted from the shadows at the back of the boat. A black coat flapped in the rising wind. A pitch hat hid the man’s face in darkness. A steel cutlass, glowing red as the storm clouds above, burned in the man’s hand. Jim’s heart beat like a hammer in his chest. His legs quivered beneath him. The dark man raised his blade and leveled it at Jim’s chest. Then he swung it out over the raging sea, toward the storm. Jim followed the sword to the clouds. A flurry of lightning bolts blazed within the tempest. The lightning formed a face in the blackness.
    The face of a skull in the storm.
    “Jim Morgan,” the face called with a voice of thunder. “Jim Morgan!”
    Jim flew awake. Cold sweat had beaded upon his brow. His shirt clung tight to his damp chest. Stuck for a moment in the tight space between awake and asleep, Jim frantically searched the room for the man in black and the crimson storm. Yet all he found was his small space in the lighthouse, window open, and hammock swaying back and forth beneath him.
    Footfalls on the wooden steps outside Jim’s door creaked into his room and MacGuffy appeared. He held a candleholder in one gnarled finger. The whispering flame cast a wavering yellow over his old, scarred face.
    “Heard ya moanin’ and groanin’ from all the way down the stairs, lad,” MacGuffy said shortly, searching the room with his lone eye. “Beye all right, young Morgan?” Jim sat up and wiped the sweat from his face with the back of his hand.
    “I think so, MacGuffy. Just a bad dream, that’s all.”
    “Yer too old for nightmares, boy,” MacGuffy replied gruffly. He shook his head and lowered the candle a bit, as if a bit disappointed no real danger lurked about to confront. “Conquer yer wakin’ fears and ye’ll conquer the sleepin’ ones as well, or so me pappy told me once. Now what was it ye were dreamin’? Spiders? Dragons? Ghosts? Girls?” MacGuffy laughed with a gravelly sound more akin to coughing or barking. But Jim only furrowed his brow, licking the sweat from his upper lip, trying with great effort to hold the dream in his mind like water in his hands.
    “It was a storm. A crimson storm. It covered the sky and had a face…a skull face in the clouds.” MacGuffy’s rough chortle caught in his throat. His ruined smile faltered. For a long moment the old pirate stood silent and still in the doorway, looking at Jim over the whispering candle flame with his one remaining eye.
    “A red storm?”
    “Yes, a crimson storm. And the storm knew my name.”
    MacGuffy stood like a statue for a long time, studying Jim intently. But after a while the pirate’s smile once more found its way back onto his face, forced though it seemed to Jim.
    “Well, twas only a dream, my boy. Mayhaps brought about by me