***
“Captain? Are you alive?”
He came to groggily and opened his eyes. Not that that did much good, though, for the place he found himself in was as dark as the back of his eyelids and just as claustrophobic. The first thing he noticed before he could respond to his caller was the air: it was thick, dank, heavy, hard to breathe and smelling of soil. His lungs had to work twice as hard to get half as much oxygen and although he could not sense anything tangibly different about the atmosphere, a gut feeling told him that something was wrong. Oxygen-choked as it was, however, his sluggish brain was too slow to work out what.
Panic almost overtook him, but he held himself together with the resolute discipline befitting of a captain. He knew he must move, escape his present situation and find somewhere that his mind could be sharp once more, where it could puzzle out his predicament with the energy provided by an influx of cool, fresh, life-giving oxygen. Yet when he tried, he found himself bound- and then panic really did begin to boil within his gut. His writhing and struggling told him that ropes entwined the flesh around his hands and feet; its rough, abrasive texture cut into his skin and left it red, sore and bleeding.
His efforts were not working, so he tried to leave his lying-down position and sit up to see whether he might have more success, perhaps by finding something to rub himself up against and weaken the fibrous bonds. As he did so, however, his head bumped against a hard surface of solidified, root-entangled soil and, though his mind was slow and dull from lack of oxygen, he understood his situation perfectly.
“They’ve bloody buried me alive!”
“Yes, they have. We worked that out too.”
He jumped at the sound of another person’s voice. He had almost forgotten the call which had awoken him; whoever it was, the voice was unfamiliar, muffled, unclear.
“Who are you?” he demanded. “Who’s there?”
“Captain, don’t you recognise me?”
He took some time to recognise the voice. It was originally strange and slurred, almost impossible to comprehend. Yet as he considered it further, he began to recognise a familiar tone in the stranger’s voice.
“Jones? Jawface Jones?”
“That’s me,” came the reply. “I survived.”
“But I saw you dead! You were slumped against a tree!”
“Not dead, though. Just unconscious. They buried us here all the same, probably planning a slow death by suffocation.”
“The scoundrels!” shouted Bluebeard, before realising the foolhardiness of wasting what little air they had on angry outbursts. “Who else is here? Do you know what happened to the others?”
“Ethelred made it out alive,” reported Jones. “They had pity on him because he was old. The same can’t be said for Gunner Zach. He must have taken out a hundred ninjas before they managed to overwhelm him. We lost Jake as well, and I’m afraid Timmy the Brick is gone, too.”
“How did he die?” asked Bluebeard, unsure he wanted to know.
“Suicide. Accidental, of course. He was just spinning around slashing and shooting anything he saw- and then he missed and shot himself. Straight in the head.”
Bluebeard sighed. “And Simon?” he asked. “What of him?”
“I’m here too!” chimed Simon’s voice. Despite the peril they were all in, he was somehow managing to stay cheerful; Bluebeard could hear it in his voice and it both pleased and irritated him. “Although it’s a bit cramped in here, I must say. My belly’s touching the ceiling!”
“It might be the only thing keeping it up,” mused Jones cynically. He turned back to the Captain and continued, “Simon was knocked out too. I don’t know whether they thought we were dead or not when they buried us, but from what I can tell it’s quite a shallow grave. We might be able to dig our way out.”
“With what?” asked Bluebeard.
“With our feet, with our hands. But it would help if we weren’t all tied up,” commented Jones.
“We could kick our way out,” suggested Simon the Holy. “We can still use our feet as one.”
They all murmured in approval. So began their collective attempt at freedom through their feet, digging and scraping with the heels of their boots. To an outside observer, the whole scene would have looked either desperate or comical as they floundered like fish under the ocean of earth, thrashing their feet about like a cod starved of water.
It was working, though. After a few minutes their dark, muddy tomb was met by a solitary glimpse of sunlight in the left-hand corner by Bluebeard’s feet, and as they kept working that glimpse became larger and larger until they could almost see the trees outside. Hope was building in each of their souls at the very real possibility of escape and freedom and life and air and…
And then, disaster struck. Just as they were all scrambling to break through the last layer of earth, the roof caved in and Simon was left with soil filling his every orifice, suffocating. Jawface and the Captain instantly stopped work to avoid another collapse.
All was silence and shock and tension as the two of them gazed in horror at the place where their crewmate had just been laying. The light from the outside world allowed them each a small amount of vision within their tiny cavern. Where this small gift from the world above had been a blessing only moments earlier, it was now an unwelcome curse showing them the terrible image of soil and mud where Simon’s body had been.
Jawface thought fast. “Quickly, Captain, bite off my ropes!”
The Captain earnestly leant over and began biting and chewing, nibbling and gnawing away at the ropes which bound Jones’ chest. The process was laborious and painfully slow: it took two minutes before Jones’ hands were freed and he was able to begin the process of digging out Simon from his living grave and hope that it was not too late.
The collapse had benefitted Bluebeard, however. Now that Jawface was dealing with Simon he allowed himself to notice that the ceiling above him had collapsed right on top of him in the form of a coating of soil covering his body just enough to colour him brown, and he was now staring, blinking, into the sunlight right above him. It must have been midday, for there were no shadows in sight and the heat was almost unbearable after the cold of their underground tomb.
He stood up, hopping about on his bound legs and lapped up the air around him. He could feel it flowing through his mouth and into his lungs, carrying with it a life-giving aura which animated him once more and gave life to his mind. He could think clearly again.
Being out in the sunlight once more, he was grateful for every part of his being. He lifted up his hands to his face simply to look at them. They were old hands, mostly obscured by the thick rope binds and the grains of soil discolouring his skin. They collected in the wrinkles on his palm so that as he poured away what soil he could, he was left with black and brown lines demarcating his lifeline and love line, all the kind of nonsense Liu would talk about if he asked her.
Presently Jawface and Simon joined him in the sunlight, blinking and fresh. Jones had dug out his colleague in record time, and as he and Bluebeard looked at their rescued shipmate they let loose deep belly laughs at the sight of him. Though freed, he was still more dirt than man and resembled a monster from the deep: his face, hair and clothes were all the same muddy brown colour of the soil below and parts of him were indistinguishable as human digits: his left hand, for example, had not yet been freed from the earth and was just a round clod of mud on the end of his arm.
Simon laughed too and began dusting himself off. Eventually the three of them calmed down and they became serious, surveying their surroundings for clues as to how to get out of here.
They were in an empty part of the woods. There was no sign of any human life or civilisation around them, save for the freshly dug mounds of earth where the ninjas had buried their dead. It appeared that they had simply gone, vanished, left the three pirates for dead and never assumed that they could escape from their earthen tomb.
They had been wrong.
“Are you okay?” Jones asked Simon with concern now that the merriment had died down.
“Yes, yes, I’m fine,” he said, spitting out the last bits of dirt from his mouth. “Now what are we going to do? Get after them, I suppose?”
“Get back to the mansion,” decided Bluebeard. “That’s where they’ll be going. It’s where they knew I was, and they’ll probably be after the rest of my crew too.”
He had more to say, but the words choked in his throat. He had been foolish. He had led his crew into a trap and now two of them lay dead; his fault entirely. He had accused Greenbeard of mutiny when in actual fact his advice would have been sound to follow. What cut him deeper, though, was the thought of having to return to his younger brother and admit his mistake. It never does one good to admit one’s mistakes, especially on a pirate ship. His crew would take it as weakness rather than repentance and perhaps, just perhaps, that mutiny that Greenbeard had always longed for was on the cards.
Nevertheless, the mansion was the place to go. Resolutely he climbed out of the pit (for the three of them had still been standing thigh-deep in their would-be graves) and pulled his two mates out with him. The pit looked deeper from this angle than it had felt inside: out in the light, he could only see a gaping chasm of pitch darkness out of which were clambering two human forms. Their feet slipped and slid on the wet mud wall as they pulled