Desperate Search

By now, I was forced to confront the concerning and rather frightening possibility that the members of the crew had never been here in the first place. After days of careful scrutiny, I had realized that the deck, which should have relatively recent bloodstains from the battle with the monsters, instead held only the barest hints of red, visible only by straining the eye.

Moreover, the storage room for rations was caked in dust, as were most of the lower decks where I had not trod much. At this point, there was no denying: there had never been a crew on this ship, or if there had been one, it was a matter of years long past.

For lonely days, I sat alone, occasionally eating some canned foods or drinking bottles of water. Staring blankly ahead into the distance, I recalled sacred bonds forged between friends, the comrades I had fought beside… the deep conversations or terrible jokes that had been shared freely… even the daily bustle on the ship and the strange loyalty I had felt to the ship and its crew….

It was hard to believe that all I had now was the unmanned ship and maybe the ghosts of its crew. Paralyzed by disbelief and a sense of loss, I spent days reminiscing about the thousand tiny interactions I had on a daily basis with the crew, etching them into my memories.

Finally, when my soul was so heavy that I would have sunk like a stone in water, I turned in desperation to another course of action: trying to piece together the sparse information I had to work with. 

Aside from conversations with ghosts or hallucinations that I was unsure existed at all, I could only search the ship for any hints of the past. Days spent hunting through every corner of the ship yielded little more than a few tattered papers from the captain's quarters and an illegible logbook, too weathered to be read. It was only on the fifth day since I had woken up on a ghost ship that I finally found something of importance.

As I was rummaging through the drawers of the storeroom, I found a strange notebook, with dusty pages so fragile I feared they would disintegrate at touch. Gingerly, I flipped through the pages, wincing every time I heard one page ripping free from another. 

However, as I started properly reading into the pages, what I found left me shook to the core.