Dark Waters

Don’t think about that, Brian ordered himself.

Brian’s eye snagged on a new paragraph.

Captain Sheehan and the Wreck of the Goblin, said the heading.

The wreck of the Goblin wasn’t what they were looking for either, but Brian paused anyway. He loved stories about boats.

In 1807, went the text, the Goblin was a merchant vessel on Lake Champlain. Her master was called William Sheehan, and folk said that he was the smartest, the handsomest, and the most ruthless ship’s captain between Burlington and Ticonderoga.

But the Embargo Act of 1807 stopped his trade, and so Captain Sheehan turned to smuggling. He smuggled timber to the British fleet in Halifax and smuggled linen back. And he was good at that too.

Until the night he, his ship, and his crew disappeared.

On a foggy night in the fall of 1808, the Goblin waited at the mouth of Otter Creek to pick up a cargo. But the revenue cutter Fly had been warned about the notorious Goblin. She was waiting. Sheehan and his men were forced to flee.

The ships raced across the lake, into the night. The Goblin led, with the Fly sailing after. All night the two ships sailed. Sheehan tried every trick he knew to lose the Fly, but the revenue cutter hung on.

Finally, the fog dispersed and the moon rose, revealing a terrible sight.

The Goblin was no longer under sail. She was sinking. Bow to the sky and stern in the lake. She must have run aground, but on what? The two ships were in open water.

The Fly went closer. And closer. But before she could reach the Goblin, the smuggler went down with a gurgle. The sailors on the Fly waited to hear the shouts of survivors.

But there was only silence.

When dawn came, the Fly swept the area where they’d seen the Goblin go down.

But there was nothing. Not so much as a floating plank to show where the Goblin had been at all. Men and ship had been swallowed by the lake.

But on foggy nights, it’s said, you can still see the Goblin racing across the lake. And you can still hear Sheehan cursing the Fly for sending his ship to her doom—

The lights flickered.

Brian’s head jerked up from the book. Ollie and Coco looked around too, warily. The lights flickered again.

“Must be the storm—” Coco began.

And then the lights went out.

Right at that same moment, someone knocked—boom, boom, boom—on the door.

The three of them froze. They knew better than to scream. They stared at the door. The only light came from the fire. It threw their shadows big and strange on the walls.

Boom. This time the knock shot them to their feet and close together. Coco tripped over her pile of books; Ollie caught her, and they stood in the middle of the room, hands gripping tight.

“I didn’t see anyone outside!” Brian breathed. “I didn’t see a car . . .”

“There wasn’t a car,” whispered Ollie. “We’d have seen the lights.”

“Maybe it drove up with the lights off?” whispered Coco.

Ollie glanced down at her wrist. She was wearing a watch. But it wasn’t an ordinary watch. It had belonged to her mother, who was dead. Its screen was cracked; it didn’t tell time. But sometimes it gave Ollie advice.

Like now.

It was glowing faintly blue, and a single word jumped on the screen in faint, flickering letters.

hush, it said.