Summary
A ghost-galleon drifts out of a winter fogbank into Copenhagen’s charcoal dusk, barnacled timbers exhaling the chill of a century-old shipwreck; on deck, a lone sailor—eyes like wet ash—clutches a logbook whose ink bleeds seawater. Below, in the vessel’s ribcage of rotted oak, three women—one a lighthouse-keeper’s daughter, one a vanished opera diva, one a child who sketches drowning faces—whisper to the dark as if it were a confidant. When the tide delivers this impossible carcass to the Nyhavn quay, Valdemar Psilander’s customs officer—equal parts cartographer of grief and amateur thanatologist—steps aboard and finds the ship’s chronometer still ticking backwards. Each reversed second peels another layer from the city’s moral varnish: a shipping magnate’s empire built on insurance-fraud wrecks, a pastor’s sermons salted with smuggled morphine, a cinematographer who has been filming funerals to splice the dead into new narratives. The women escape the hold at ebb tide, scattering like black-backed gulls across cobblestones, pursued by a constable whose reflection no longer appears in mirrors. Stella Lind’s revenant diva sings a single aria in the Royal Theatre’s catacombs; the note shatters glass, loosing harbor rats that carry away the audience’s shadows. Else Frölich’s child draws every face she sees onto parchment that later washes up inside emptied rum bottles, portraits aging decades in minutes. Gudrun Houlberg’s lighthouse-keeper ignites the beacon during daylight, steering steamers toward submerged mines. By the time Psilander deciphers that the logbook is addressed to him from a future self who never returned from a rescue mission, the city has already begun to sink—first metaphorically, then literally, cellar by cellar, until spires resemble masts and church bells clang like drowned buoys. The final reel dissolves in brine: the dead ship reanimates, sails east with every character aboard, leaving only a silent pier and a single copper coin corroded into the shape of a heart.
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