Claws tearing through skin on chest

Thirty years back the Corrigan Rose lay becalmed off the Azores for nineteen days. No wind, no fish, just the sea gone flat as a pewter plate and the sky doubled beneath us. On the nineteenth night a boy named Tobias Wren went up to the foretop to look for a breeze and never came down. We found his shirt pinned to the rigging like a flag, and that was all we ever found of him.

On the seventh night after, the old bosun heard scratching under the forward hatch. Not rats. Rats don't sound like a rake dragged across slate. He lifted the boards, and three black claws came up through the planking, and then the planking itself split like wet canvas, long strips peeling back. Through the gap we could see the sky. Stars, thick as salt, sitting in a hole in our own ship.

The stars were the worst of it. They weren't any sky I'd sailed under. The claws drew back into the dark and took the stillness with them, and by morning the sails filled from the south-west, sweet and steady. Nobody went near the forward hatch after that, and the bosun wouldn't say what he'd seen down there.

That's the truth of it. Sometimes the sea gives back what it takes, but it tears its way out first and leaves the sky showing through. Now, who's for the last of the grog?