Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

In October of 1955, a small merchant ship named the Joyita set out across the South Pacific from the islands of Samoa, bound for the distant atolls of the Tokelau group, carrying twenty-five people — sixteen crew and nine passengers, among them a doctor, a government official, and children. She never reached her destination. Five weeks later, hundreds of miles off her intended course, another vessel came upon her drifting alone across the empty ocean, listing heavily to one side, half-swamped with water, and utterly deserted. Not one of the twenty-five people who had sailed aboard her was ever seen again. No bodies were recovered. No lifeboats were found. The ship herself, though damaged and waterlogged, was still afloat — and there lay the heart of the mystery, for the Joyita was, by her very construction, a vessel that should have been almost impossible to sink. Why the people aboard a virtually unsinkable ship would abandon her into the open sea, and what became of them all, has ne...

At dawn on the last day of January 1921, the men at the Cape Hatteras lookout station on the North Carolina coast saw a great five-masted schooner sitting hard aground on the Diamond Shoals, the treacherous shifting sandbanks that have swallowed so many ships they are called the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Her sails were still set. She looked, from a distance, like a vessel waiting patiently for the tide. But no one answered the signals, no boat put out from her side, and for days the wild surf kept every rescue craft away. When at last the sea calmed enough for men to board her, they climbed onto the deck of the Carroll A. Deering and found her utterly, impossibly empty. The entire crew of ten or eleven men was gone, and they have never been found. A New Ship on an Ordinary Voyage The Carroll A. Deering was no derelict. She was a large and handsome commercial schooner, only a year or two old, built in Maine and named for the son of her owner. In the late summer of 1920 she had saile...