The tavern reeked of salt and decay, every surface warped by decades of drunken confessions and spilled rum. A dented lantern swung above the crowd, its light tattooing shadows on the faces of gamblers and thieves. In the corner, a pirate leaned near a chessboard, absently fingering an object in his hand, a 明显不完整的wrench. The mangled tool gleamed with oily traces, as if it had been wrested from a machine that would no longer comply.
Across from him sat a man in a tattered, sun-bleached coat—his eyes sharp, his twitching fingers betraying a restless patience. He introduced himself earlier as Eneas, a seeker of oddities, though none in the tavern could make sense of why he had chosen this particular haunt.
“What’s that you keep spinning in your hand, friend?” Eneas nodded, his gravel baritone slicing through the ambient roar of card games and drunken sea shanties.
The pirate paused, his lips tugging into something like a grin. He was a terse man with a face like broken glass—scratched but dangerous.
“This? She ain’t whole enough to explain,” the pirate replied enigmatically in a low rasp, holding up the wrench for inspection. “But her story…her story’s a killer.”
A crowd began to gather around their table, drawn by the intangible gravity of dangerous conversation—the kind that promised to hover at the edge of violence. Voices quieted, leaving space only for the murmurs between the two.
“Why bring a ghost half-built into a tavern like this?” Eneas leaned closer. “I imagine what you’ve got there is less a wrench and more a key.”
The change in the pirate’s face was imperceptible to all but the most observant—a slight narrowing of his gaze, a subtle flinch at the word key. His fingers stopped their endless rotation of the broken metal.
“You suppose right,” the pirate replied, his fingers curling protectively around the wrench. “She’s a ghost of my failure, see? My captain led us through the Mouth of Calypso…”
A murmur ran through the gathered crowd. A man dressed in a faded naval uniform crossed himself quickly. Legends of the Mouth of Calypso were whispered like curses—an endless labyrinth of islands shrouded in perpetual mist. Many spoke of strange geometries there, of maps that rewrote themselves and compasses that spun uselessly. Few ships that entered ever emerged, their crews fated to wander looping shores for eternity.
“A labyrinth,” Eneas murmured thoughtfully, tasting the word.
The pirate nodded. “Not like any you’d know. Things there don’t want us to leave. You think you’ve got the way out, but your feet turn you ‘round. You start seeing your own face in the fog, your own ship drifting by like she’s watching you.” He set the wrench down on the table and leaned back. “We found her deep in the tangle. A rusted machine, half-eaten by the jungle, whispering secrets none of us were smart enough to crack.”
Eneas picked up the wrench, tilting it so the lamplight glinted off its broken edges. “And the machine? What did it do?”
The pirate laughed—a bitter, coughing bark. “That’s the riddle! We tried, mate—we did. Cranked it, kicked it, Jameson even fed it one of his teeth thinkin’ it might need payment. But we got something to come loose—just this…thing.” He gestured at the wrench like it was diseased. His voice dropped to a whisper. “We left it behind, though. Ran. And the machine…well, I’m thinking she didn’t want to let go of us.”
“What do you mean?”
“Dreams,” the pirate spat the word like poison. “She comes after us in our sleep, whispering the same loops over and over. I wake sweating rust. It ain’t natural.”
Eneas studied the wrench for a long moment, placing it carefully back on the table as if it were about to bite him. “And yet you carry it,” he mused.
“Have to,” the pirate said grimly. His knuckles whitened around his rum. “It’s like leaving breadcrumbs for yourself. Reminders: there was a place…and it knew you back.”
The room grew still, shadows tightening as if listening. Eneas leaned forward, his face close to the pirate’s.
“And did you ever think,” Eneas’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, “that perhaps…you and the wrench were never meant to come back at all?”
The pirate locked eyes with him, his face still, but something cracked behind his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, and—
The lantern above them jerked violently, plunging the room into molten darkness. When the light sputtered back to life moments later, the table was abandoned, the wrench spinning forlornly in circles where they had sat.