Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

is.”
    Gideon sighed, but the writer’s attention had been diverted to a commotion outside.
    “Curious,” said Stoker. “Allow me to settle the bill and let us take a look.”
    Gideon saw a body of people moving down the street toward the harbor. Being tall, Stoker could peer above the heads of most men, and he reported a crowd gathering near the little beach between the pier and the East Cliff. Stoker said, “There appears to be a ship perilously close to land, observing a most erratic course.”
    “A Russian, they say,” said a passing man breathlessly. “Schooner, about to run aground on Tate Hill Beach. They reckon it’s deserted.”
    Stoker let the man go and Gideon met his eyes. He said, “Two abandoned ships in the space of a few days is not a usual occurrence around here, Mr. Stoker.”
    The writer stroked his beard. “Then, Mr. Smith, I suggest we investigate.”

3

Son of the Dragon
    From the Journal of Abraham Stoker
    A most diverting day. After breakfast, I met an interesting young man with a strange tale. He had lost his father to a mystery of the sea—the family trawler had turned up utterly abandoned. I confess I was about to gently suggest that such occurrences, while tragic, were not utterly unknown. Then there was commotion at the harbor, and we saw a rather curious sight: a schooner, sails set, drifting haphazardly toward port and ignoring bullhorn calls from the harbormaster and the coastguard to identify itself and arrest its course.
    The crowd drew back with a gasp as the schooner, with no sign of crew on deck, ran aground on the stretch of sand beneath the East Cliff, Tate Hill Beach. The harbormaster, Randolph, led a small contingent of the local constabulary to the beached vessel. They had been on for mere moments when the police officers, their faces pale and grimly set, returned to the beach and began to move the crowd back to the promenade. There were mutterings of it being some kind of plague ship, and one old maritime type, chewing tobacco and fixing nets with his gnarled fingers, commented, “A ship like that has to fetch up somewhere, even if it is hell.”
    As he spoke, one of the men opened up the hold and from the depths leaped the most vicious-looking black hound. It had a shaggy, lustrous pelt as dark as midnight, and it bounded from the deck to the sand, baring its white, glistening teeth at the crowd, before making for the East Cliff and disappearing. The parallels between this and young Mr. Smith’s own tale were, of course, difficult to ignore. Two abandoned ships in the space of a few days? A mystery was unfolding for certain.
    I had struck up a relationship with the harbormaster, and we had swapped many tales over the preceding weeks. He remembered I had a smattering of Russian, and he asked me if I would cast my eye over the log of the schooner.
    The Dmitri was registered in the port of Varna, on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. According to the log, the captain had accepted a fortnight prior a commission to deliver a cargo to Whitby, with instructions that the crew was to await delivery at the stroke of midnight precisely a week ago.
    The cargo—three long wooden boxes—arrived in horse-drawn coaches, each one driven by two of, according to the captain’s log, the most beautiful young women he had ever seen in all his travels. Due to the late hour, some of the crew had imbibed liquor, and one seaman announced he had quite taken a shine to one of the women. I had expected to read that the captain immediately put a stop to such dishonorable talk, but it seems he merely encouraged the man, who went off in pursuit of the coaches.
    He was not seen again . . . and his was not the last disappearance on the Dmitri ’s ill-fated voyage. After becoming becalmed near an archipelago of Greek islands, another crewman vanished in the night. The Dmitri stopped for supplies at Gibraltar, and a crewmember absconded. The journey continued, but relations between the captain and the