Many Years later, I've almost forgotten about the incident, or rather repressed it after it had been bothering me for almost a whole year and I was starting to doubt myself. I haven't dared to tell anyone about it yet without at least being able to prove something so as not to be declared crazy.

On my morning walks, I continue to pass the little ship lock once or twice a week and only occasionally think about the incident, but each time I go back to the spot where the old lady in the yellow raincoat disappeared from one moment to the next.

One day, as I was standing at this spot again, looking towards the ship lock and lost in thought, trying to reconstruct what the ghost ship looked like back then, I suddenly got a strange, indefinable feeling in my stomach. I realized that all the noises around me had stopped and just then I felt a hand on my shoulder and the old lady's voice, which seemed to come from everywhere, said: "Well, young man, are you ready for an adventure this time?".

When I turned around abruptly, there was no one to be seen, but at the same time there was a loud hissing sound behind me from the direction of the ship lock. I turned back again and a blindingly bright light shot towards me at unbelievable speed. Before I could form a thought, let alone make a sound, I found myself on board a strangely alien-looking sailing ship, surrounded by a crew of mysterious creatures whose uniforms also seemed very strange to me, but interestingly still looked like something from a distant past i know.

Confused and frightened, I tried to find my bearings. The ship somehow seemed to be tumbling through space and time, even uncontrollably, as I couldn't categorize the image, or rather the constantly changing images that were presented to me around the ship, as anything other than a kind of vortex of past, present and future. But before I could even begin to organize my thoughts, something very tangible emerged from these images. Another ship, a ghost ship, THE ghost ship, the one I had already seen in the ship lock back then and it seemed to be controlled by an eerie presence.

The appearance of the ghost ship panicked the crew and me. We seemed to be in great danger. Following an inaudible command, the crew shouted wildly in a language completely unknown to me and moved perfectly across the deck as if in a rehearsed choreography, regained control of the ship, set sail at lightning speed and headed for the ghost ship at breakneck speed.

A wave of energy pierced the air as the two ships collided, causing a huge explosion. When I regained consciousness, I found myself back at the ship lock, exhausted and completely disoriented, but at first glance at least physically unharmed. It seemed as if time had been rewound and everything was as it had been before, including all the normal noise around. Except that I was no longer standing on the shore but on the bridge in the middle of the airlock, with a strange, not very large but surprisingly heavy artifact hanging around my neck, obviously a remnant from my time travel. A pendant decorated with unknown mysterious symbols. As I grabbed it with my hand, a strange sense of familiarity flashed through me. The artifact had to be the key to a secret I hadn't even dared to guess. With a sense of determination, I put the pendant in my pocket and vowed that one day I would solve the mystery that had just opened up before me further than I had ever expected. Until then, I would remain vigilant and wait for the next adventure to call me ...