Ship's Ghost

Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer

Almost everyone on board had reported seeing it here or there in the dimly lit passages of the ship. I had not yet had the pleasure. Perhaps because I usually worked the greenhouses. But I had now been reassigned for a time to engineering. They needed some strong bodies down there to help scrub out the massive carbon filters.

It was a kilometre walk from midships to the engine room. I passed no one as I clanked along the deck plates. Then suddenly as I looked up I saw it. There standing on the left side of the passageway, somewhat tucked into a dark doorway stood the entity that people had dubbed, “The Ghost”. I for one did not believe in ghosts, but I still froze in my tracks, holding my breath as my brain tried to decipher what my eyes were seeing.

It was basically human in shape, roughly the size of a child, obsidian black from head to toe, without a face, or any other discernible features. In fact, it was so utterly black that it appeared almost as if it were a human-shaped hole into another dimension. And perhaps that’s what it was. The manifestation of an unimaginable life form into human shape using a rift in space-time in order to what? Study us? More likely it would be to communicate.

I realized that it was starting to fade already into dark grey, its edges becoming blurry. And as it melted back into the shadows I had one more look into that faceless thing and I felt its sad gaze. I felt its pity for us. I felt as if our traveling at warp drive was some how perverse, or an abomination to it. The ghost was now gone. I continued to trudge forward, quietly wondering to myself what we were doing way out here anyway.