Dobbs shook his head. Did he dream it all in his delirium? He told the mate to fetch Caleb. The green hand made his way to the quarterdeck. He wore a straw hat to protect his bleached skin from the sunlight. A smile crossed his pale, wrinkled face when he saw the captain had recovered.

“What happened last night?” Dobbs said.

Caleb told the captain that after Dobbs had passed out, the natives had left the ship and returned carrying wooden buckets that emitted a pale blue luminescence. The natives went from man to man. He couldn’t see what they were doing. Then the natives left. Soon after, the crew started waking up. The captain asked Caleb to help him down to his cabin. He eased into his chair and opened the ship’s log.

“A strange business,” the captain started. Although his hands were still shaking, he wrote down every detail as he remembered it. Then he gazed with longing at a miniature portrait of his pretty young wife, and he finished his entry with a single declaration: “Going home!”

FAIRHAVEN, MASSACHUSETTS, 1878

The French mansard-roofed mansion known to the townspeople as the Ghost House stood back from a secluded street behind a screen of dark-leafed beech trees. Guarding the long driveway were the bleached jawbones of a sperm whale, placed upright in the ground so their tapering tips met in a Gothic arch.

On a golden October day, two boys stood under the whalebone arch, daring each other to sneak up the driveway and look in the windows. Neither youngster would take the first step; they were still trading taunts when a shiny black horse-drawn carriage clattered up to the gate.

The driver was a heavyset man whose expensive russet suit and matching derby hat failed to cloak his villainous looks. His rough-hewn features had been sculpted by the hard knuckles of the opponents he had faced back in his prizefighting days. Age had not been kind to the misshapen nose, the cauliflower ears, and the eyes squeezed to nailheads by scar tissue.

The man leaned over the reins and glared down at the boys. “What’re you lads doing here?” he growled like the old pit bull he resembled. “Up to no good, I suppose.”

“Nothin’,” one boy said with averted eyes.

“Is that a fact?” the man sneered. “Well, I wouldn’t be hanging around here if I was you. There’s a mean ghost lives in that house.”

“See,” said the other boy. “Told you so.”

“Listen to your friend. Ghost is seven feet tall. Hands like pitchforks,” the man said, injecting a tremor into his voice. “Got fangs that could rip boys like you in half just so he could suck out your guts.” He pointed his whip toward the house and his mouth dropped open in horror. “He’s coming! By God, he’s coming. Run! Run for your lives!”