For Sonya’s Three Line Tales photo prompt.
Photo ©Annie Spratt via Unsplash
The table was set for dinner, napkins unfolded, chairs pulled out but everyone appeared to have left before the food arrived—reminiscent of something, she thought.
All she found in the kitchen was the roast that had been left to dry out in the oven and the soup and vegetables all gone clock cold, so she lit a candle before going to have a poke around in the cellar.
It was when she opened the cellar door and got the whiff of gas that she remembered the theory about the Marie Celeste and just had time to curse the lack of electricity and the damn candle before—
Jane Dougherty Writes 
Nicely done. 😇
Thanks Ellen 🙂 I heard a radio play years ago about the Marie Celeste and it has haunted me ever since.
An eerir tale . This could also be Mrs Haversham’s room before the spiders. 😲
Oh no! Our heroine falls victim! Well done 🙂
🙂 The guests are all hiding in the garden shed, waiting for the gas board to turn it off at the mains.
Ah! Here I thought the gas had killed everyone 😉 We’re like two ships passing — brilliant!
They may as well be dead for all the good they did our stout nosy parker heroine! I’ve heard the radio play, so I’m a few imaginitive jumps ahead of myself with this one 🙂
Nice! What radio show were you referring to with this? Sounds juicy!
It wasn’t a show, it was a BBC radio play based on a theory that the cargo the Marie Celeste had been carrying started to ferment and when the captain realised the danger of explosion, he opened the hold to let the gases out and had all the crew abandon the ship in the lifeboats, tied together so they wouldn’t drift away from the ship. He reckoned that the gas would disperse after a few hours and they’d be able to go back. He was in a boat with his wife and seven year old daughter. I forget exactly how it happened but the boats drifted, there was a storm, the lines were lost the anchor line broke and the boats just drifted away from the ship and were never found. It really marked me as a terrible scenario though nobody knows for sure what happened or why.
Oh! Sounds wonderfully tragic….a thriller of a play 🙂
It was. And tragic because the casks never did explode, the captain had exaggerated the danger to show off in front of his wife and child, and the danger came from the ocean, not the cargo.
How awful! True story is seems, not just theatrics?
It’s a hypothesis based on what they found in the hold and the captain’s character and relationship with the crew.
Interesting…what a mysteriously tragic story indeed…
Awesome!
Uh-oh.
Boom! Nice one.
Thank you!