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The Haunted Barn
Theodore Hooker purchased The Drake - a great three mast ship, festooned with 48 guns and timbers thick around as a man's chest. Eighty nine men it took, to man her sail and run her decks. Captained by Mr. Able Smith, The Drake was the pride of the Southern Raiders. Mr. Hooker’s business with this fine vessel was revenge. Revenge for his brother’s copulation of his wife’s privates! Revenge for the bitterness of raising a feeble brained child, begot by this transgression and revenge for the long overdue death of his over bearing mother! Mr. Hooker cracked and ordered the men of The Drake put to death and tossed into the hold! The ship was hexed! He then christened it The Mary Beth, after his cheating wife and manned the ship with insane degenerates of society - true cutthroats, men criminally faltered, filled with filthy, rotten souls. The now sadly cursed ship embarked upon a forty day slaughterfest. Any victim he chose, The Mary Beth pounced upon with a great fury, her men lusting for battle at each encounter. During a night’s sail to San Francisco, Captain Hooker spotted a ship. He heaved to and brought his 48 guns to bear and unleashed a broadside of shot into the hapless ship. Little did he know the ship he was about to board was the prison ship Juno. Her men were hardened criminals brought to justice and unchained to fight for their lives! The prisoners, a variety of murders, rapists and homicidal maniacs, were armed with knives, cutlass, and pike prepared to receive Hooker’s men! The great slaughter commenced, as Hooker himself, lead the charge over the gunwales. His men, whipped into a bloodlust, attack! The men of the Juno charge forward! The crash of steel on bone kills men instantly! With shattered bodies and broken backs, Hooker’s attack is recoiled and crashes back upon the deck of The Mary Beth. The hacking and crushing of bone could be heard over the insane cries of men tearing each other to pieces. The solid mass of lunatics dance and kill to the staccato cadence of death. The cannon’s carnage splashes into the walls, as the cutlass spills entrails into the hull of the crying ship. Sea foam and gore awash across the decks, as yet another man is chopped to pieces. The curtain drops when Hooker’s cutlass chops ten men down to finish this grisly episode, for he is the only one amongst the piles of dead and human destruction to be alive! With the crazed Hooker at the helm, The Mary Beth slips adrift with her cargo of oozing humanity rocking in the ocean’s gentle grasp. A sad ship on a sad sea. She cries for the burden she must now carry, while Captain Hooker‘s only thought is revenge for his slowly dying Mary Beth. The Mary Beth ran aground at Hunters Point Bay and sank up to the gun deck. Hooker lived off the flesh of his vessel until he was found by a strange group of locals. They thought Captain Hooker to be the walking dead. Hooker, feeling powerful again, found that the strange people worshiped him. He set about de-constructing the ship of great death. He coerced the workers to construct a massive barn made from the blood soaked timbers salvaged from the ship. He crushed bones into concrete, blood into paint, and used body parts of his own crew to insulate the walls. He created crumbling sidewalks of bones that ramble lazily under archways of skulls outlining Hunter’s Point Bay. It was at this spot on Halloween night that he would conjure the spirit of his old ship and unleash her wicked wrath upon the merchantmen of the bay. Upon completion of the night’s grim task, the Barn would witness outrageously wild homecoming parties, carried on in honor of the ghost ship The Mary Beth. written by: Mark Perez The Final Voyage Perched upon the ravens back, the whisper that embodies hopelessness shifts like an anxious mist through the night. The sifting stillness that moves in shapeless blocks slams into the howling wind and lays waste to all hope on Earth! Mankind is doomed! Halloween is upon us! The bubbles, ascending to the surface, travel in lazy swirling circles, their surface structure morphing, as the poisonous ether inside pushes its fingers into the womb of the ocean. Neither the Moon’s pale smile, nor Earth’s goodwill can stop the breath of death from below. Moments before the bubbles assault the oceans thin crust, the entire universe pushes back in a vain attempt to stop evil's return! Thick black clouds are torn asunder when his command breaches the surface! The unwanted message rips up through the night sky into the angel's ears, pulling tears from their eyes, and painting unholy smiles upon the cherub's faces. God, with one great hand, retains a grip upon the souls of the unlucky ones. With the other, a careless back hand casts the now empty angels from the heavens. The descending transformation is complete when all that is evil in man is transfused into the fallen angel's bodies, breathing deathly life into captain Hooker’s men! Soulless devils they are! Their task? To crash into the black mouth of the sea and set about resurrecting the great ship of death, The Mary Beth! With a great roar, her hull lurches to the surface. Ten thousand buckets of sea falls from her shoulders and crashes to death by her side. Cold blue body parts and seaweed mingle before sloshing their way towards the scuppers. Strange, cold winds from the North slap into the sails propelling her towards her gruesome task. The cutthroat sailors, once again, bring destruction upon the ships of the bay. The smell of the sea reminds them of how life was before time banished them into a circle of nautical savagery. A strange new feeling is about: for the first time, they feel fear. Even though they were already dead, the sailors felt doomed like the soldiers of Stalingrad. This night, the great Viking god ODIN dispatched his ship the Naglfar* to end Captain Hooker’s reign of terror on earth! The ghost ship, The Mary Beth, slips through the mist inches above the water and weighs anchor in Hunter’s Point Harbor. Her sailor's dead, tense hands grip the ropes, lowering the away boats. The bos'n whistle echoes shivers down the spines of the gun crews peering inland. Captain Hooker’s cutlass slaps into the backs of the dead men rowing towards land. "Row you bastards," is heard seconds before the cannonballs crash into the side of the ship, setting The Mary Beth afire! A second salvo tears a red hot path over Hooker’s head and shatters into the fo’c’s'l of the sinking ship. Huge, twirling deck splinters reign supreme and exploding powder kegs produce showers of blood across the sails. Her sailors are smashed by the falling rigging - Hooker’s men have the distinction of being already dead and killed again in the same night. Hooker and his last nine men bow their heads when The Mary Beth starts to swallow water. Soon, she lists to port, bringing the only tear Captain Hooker has ever shed trembling to his eyes. The flames of The Mary Beth reflect icy blue agony off the helmets of the Viking raiders. The destruction of Hooker’s homecoming was complete. Hooker’s last charge to avenge his ship’s death was crushed by Nordic steel, all were killed except one; Captain Hooker was spared by Odin to suffer eternity without his Mary Beth. *The Naglfar was a Nordic ship built from the fingernails of warriors killed by the Giants of Jotenheim. written by: MARK PEREZ |