Chapter Text
You had heard this little deserted cove was perfect for late night swimming and it had been. The moon wasn’t full but despite that it was still bright and it shone through the clouds illuminating the surface of the dark water like a mirror.
You had grown more comfortable in the warm water and had started singing an old disney song that felt right to sing while the moon glittered on the surface of the rippling water.
Then the other voice had synchronized with yours.
It was deep, definitely masculine and there had been something eerie about it. Something about it echoed wrong. Like the voice was both very close and far away at the same time, echoing back on itself.
Of course you immediately stopped and turned around but the voice was gone.
Had it really happened? It might have just been in your head but-
“Is someone there?”
You were still turning in the water trying to see if anyone was behind you and you were about to let out a breath, it seems like it was in your head after all.
Of course there wasn’t anyone-
“Didn’t anyone warn you there are sharks out here?"
-and ice slid down your spine because while you had looked all around on the surface of the water, it dawned on you that you hadn’t looked below the reflected surface of the ocean.
Something blotted out the moonlight behind you.
_________
The shadow behind you moves like a slick of oil upon cursed glass.
It passes around you and in front of you as if it was a living thing, melding with the water as if it’s one and the same and then it’s smiling.
Below the surface layer of the gentle breeze that’s caressing the cove and everything in it, there is a hidden frequency. It’s a sibling of the water and the shadows that surrounds you, but this one is in your ear. It’s a low thrum of humour that’s bubbled up to breach the surface and it’s just so glad to have finally met you.
“Keep your eyes open,” it tells you in a liquid whisper. “Even if you only have two of them.”
And then a light switch flicks on, and the moonlight returns in a burst of blinding white light and the shadow-voice-water thing vanishes out of existence.
“What?” You blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. “What did you say? I… is- is someone there..?”
Gentle waves lap against your chest. An unseen bird chirps from a distant treetop. No-one answers you. There is no-one there. You let out your breath that you’ve been holding, and the slow breeze winds through your hair in a caress you might mistake for indulgent pity.
But you don’t mistake it for that, because the only mistake you’ve made is to think there was someone behind you when there’s not. There’s obviously not. You turn around in the water slowly, not out of fear of course but out of defiance towards yourself. This is proof that you’re not scared and that you’re in control here and you can move however you like in this water.
The ripples your rotations make in the water are small but insistent, and are so perfectly formed they seem unworldly. They don’t spread out far from you.
You look out across the water to the hidden horizon, and for the first time in your life you feel alone in the water. You feel exposed. You feel like your subconscious is screaming at you with a gagged and bloodied mouth. There is a wonderful alien stillness to the world. The air feels thick. It feels alive.
Your mind shudders free of the cloak that’s been placed on it, and it rasps at you that you have to leave. You have to get out of the water now. Right now. Right now you have to leave before it’s too late and he comes back to get you and you have to go go go and there’s an invisible punch to your chest and electric current in your stomach.
Your survival instincts take charge and you swim fast and hard towards the shore. The ripples you create from your splashing and kicking don’t spread out far from you.
You stride back onto dry land and up the beach and don’t stop walking until you’re a safe distance away from the water’s edge. Now that you’re on dry land you feel safer, and since you feel safer you’re feeling bolder, which gives you the backbone and the curiosity to stand up straight and look back at the area of water you were just in.
Moonlight illuminates it gently. You glance up at the fat moon hanging overhead and the wispy clouds now dotted around it, and you know that was all you saw. A cloud had passed over your light source and that was the oily looking shadow you saw. And you’d been singing a song from a film about a lost fish that needs to be found and there are shark characters in it and that’s why you’d thought about sharks and warnings and eyes and- and a combination of the film you’d been thinking about and the sensible words of advice you’ve heard in many iterations over many different years - don’t swim alone, don’t swim at night, don’t swim where predators watch and wait and play - had created a voice in your head that had spoken a warning to you.
“Didn’t anyone warn you there are sharks out here?"
Just because that voice didn’t sound like yours didn’t mean it wasn’t yours. It may have been masculine with a slight edge of humour and a thick angle of remorseless hunger to it, but you often sang in different accents and tones so it must have been yours.
And just because those words had sounded like they were coming from behind you, as if someone had curled their lips up in perfect parallel to your ear, doesn’t mean there was anyone there. Your hair was wet and loose and covering your ears, which would have distorted any sounds no matter where they came from.
There was also a strong breeze blowing into your face, which would have blown any sounds behind you. Except that the breeze was...gentle. You remember is caressing you, not striking you. Maybe the breeze was stronger than you thought it was, and it was behind you and blowing into your back. Yes, that makes more sense. The wind was blowing your words behind and around you and your ears were covered by your hair and were full of water from swimming and…
...and was the wind really blowing? Yes, it must have been. And...
...did you even break the surface of the water? Yes, of course you did. You remember submerging your head at least once as you were swimming.
…
Didn’t you?
You slowly reach a hand up to touch your hair. It comes back dry.
You swallow, and your heart picks up speed. The strong wind must have dried it. The wind that was now a gale and not a breeze.
The air around you is still now. It is heavy. It’s becoming infected with humidity the longer you stand here. Water is trickling down your slowly drying skin and you wish it was sea water from your hair but you know it’s sweat from every pore your body owns.
You look back at the small patch of water you were in.
The never ending ripples in the water are hypnotising.
Your throat gets dryer and your heart works harder and why is the water still rippling? Why is the surface still churning? Was it from you swimming away from it? Or is there something unseen underneath it? Why hasn’t it stopped, and what could it be, and why are you still looking and why is everything so hot and why are you-
Something blots out the moonlight in front of you.
You scream and step back quickly and stumble and almost trip and your eyes fly wide open but they’re blind you’re blind and you can’t see anything. You brush the hair out of your eyes so fast and so hard that you hurt yourself and you let out a laugh that would make your mother cry because that’s all it was - your hair was in front of your eyes and now it’s gone and you can see again.
You hold your hair back with one hand and look at the beach and the ocean bathed in moonlight and breathe and breathe and breathe and breathe and those ripples in the water out there just look so pretty. They look so wonderfully inviting, and maybe you should look at them for a little bit longer. Just a little bit longer, to try and understand what they are.
The ripples widen. They begin to churn faster. They start to spread towards the shore.
With an effort that shouldn’t be so great, you tear your face away. You turn around and walk stiffly back to your car. Your muscles are rigid and you’re so tense you feel like they could snap and break and your neck, your cold exposed neck, is screaming at you in conjunction with your heart and legs and spine but you ignore them and do not run. You do not increase your speed and absolutely do not run.
Sudden movements trigger predators, and you don’t know which one is watching you in the dark.
You don’t know where he is.
You make it to your car and turn on the ignition and slowly drive away. The tires crunch over the gravel path, and you fight the overwhelming compulsion to turn on your full beam headlights and to lock every door. Light could attract it and if it attacks you - if it slithers up from the bathypelagic and breaks the surface of the water that’s running in parallel to your slowly moving car and leaps the distance and snarls and smashes the glass - you want your escape route to be clear.
You drive along the coast of the biggest ocean on the planet and watch the cove in your mirrors until it’s hidden by trees and overlapping rocks. You drive on, and keep its position fixed in your mind relative to wherever else you are on the surface. Your corrupted North Star is behind you, drowning but still alive. It treads water as it waits for you.
----
That night you dream of sand.
You dream of barren rock and deserts and dry cracks in the Earth’s skin and wake up slowly, like you’ve surfaced from a great depth and have finally breached the surface. Your body’s drenched in sweat and there’s salted water in your eyes.
The water doesn’t leave you.
It escapes in degrees and is then replenished. You can sweat and cry all you like but you can’t escape it. Your species was forged in the water and you’ve adapted to living on dry land and have made your home here, but it’s not where you came from. Not really. It’s not your true ancestral home, and sometimes it calls to you. Sometimes it pleads with you.
Sometimes it tricks you.
The never ending ripples of invisible water leak into your mind and settle and swirl and diffuse and you know that the human body is made up of sixty percent water, but it’s feeling uncomfortably like yours is now sixty seven.
Something has settled in your head. It’s behind your eyes and in your ears and it smells of salt and gold and that doesn’t make sense but you know it to be true. It’s something raw and valuable, and you don’t know how much it’s worth. Not yet you don’t.
What isn’t true – what can’t possibly have happened – is that someone was behind you in the water. Their warm chest was not in close parallel to your back, and they didn’t ask you a question they knew you didn’t have the correct answer to. It didn’t happen. It can’t have happened. It doesn’t make sense and there was no-one there and you’re not going to think about it anymore because it’s stupid and you’re not stupid, you’re normal and educated and have a functioning brain that can explain away any unexpected occurrences with a cold clear logic and you have better things to do with your time and you will not, absolutely will not, go back to that beach again. You do not need to. There are other coves and lagoons to explore, and that’s where you’ll go next. That’s where you’ll focus your efforts and enjoy your time and you don’t need to think about this any more.
The next night you dream of a dried up ocean.
The sea bed is like the surface of a deep space planet, rough and sharp and scarred and you see where he lives. You see where he emerges from. At the apex of a puncture wound into the Earth’s core, in the crushing depths of the Hadal Zone devoid of all colour, an outline of red lights blink invitingly in the void.
If you were to descend further into that light, if you could equalize your pressure and conserve the recirculated air of your diving suit, you would see the lights soften and widen to form the entrance of a tunnel. And if you were to dive down further, further than your species was ever meant to go, you would see a small hidden cave speckled in different lights. And you know that he would not be waiting for you there, because he’d already be with you. He’d have taken you there.
The next night you return to the beach.
And you do so because you want to, not because you have to. It’s ridiculous to be scared of something that’s not dangerous and contains no threats to you, so you’re going to visit it one more time. A small section of your primal lizard brain is screaming that you will kill yourself, but since what it’s trying to say is incorrect you don’t need to pay attention to you. But you do need to quieten it. You do need it to stop. It is unceasingly there, a core deep thrumming in your head that’s telling you things you don’t want to acknowledge and whatever it actually is, whatever’s settled down into your head, is not tugging or urging or dragging you back to the ocean, because that would imply there's at least a semblance of resistance involved and there's not. You know that you’re not being pulled back to the beach.
You know that you're being guided.
Your blood has been seasoned with salt and brine and you want to know why. It’s diffusing throughout your cells and you think, you hope, you expect, to find a rational explanation of why you feel the way you do, and the only way to get this closure is to go back to the source of where it began.
You drive along a deserted highway beneath a moon that’s growing brighter. Your heart is beating steadily, just a little bit faster than usual and that’s because of trepidation at being alone at night regardless of the situation, not because of anticipation at the thought of sinking back into the water and meeting him again.
You probably tasted some tainted water when you were singing out loud the other night, even though you were stationary and the water was as still as glass. You probably swallowed some water while you were swimming, even though you never once submerged your head below the surface. You probably inhaled some toxic gases from a passing ship, even though the cove is hidden and miles away from the nearest shipping lane.
You return to the beach and park your car, and carefully climb over the rocks and sand and ditches that form the secret path down to the cove.
Everything is still. Everything is silent.
Your heart is beating faster and your mouth is dry, and it takes only seconds to remove your clothes and fold them into a neat pile and put them on a flat rock. You’re already wearing your costume, and you walk towards the lapping water immediately. It’s best to get this over and done with, because then maybe you’ll get some peace. Maybe you’ll have peaceful sleep tonight if you can prove to yourself that there’s no-one out here but yourself.
You walk, then wade, then swim out to the spot you were last time and you do so effortlessly. You don’t know how you picked out his longitude and latitude so precisely, but you have a good memory when it counts and this must be one of those times, but.
But although there are trees and rocks surrounding the cove to form its landmarks, it’s still uncanny that you are now treading water in the exact same spot you were last time. If you were superstitious you’d say it was almost unnerving. But the sky is bright and the stars are burning, and you must be better at celestial navigation than you ever gave yourself credit for.
You tread water and enjoy the feel of the water against you.
You tread that water for three more hours, and he does not show.
As you dry yourself and get back into your car, you feel relieved. And it’s only a struggle to feel this way because you’re cold and tired.
And...now that you think about it more, maybe you’re not relieved. Maybe you’re satisfied. Yes. You’re satisfied. That’s better. You’re satisfied that you were right all along, and that there’s nothing in the water waiting for you. No-one has surfaced from the great depths of the world to make contact with you and only you. You’re not that special and you’re glad for it. You’re not special at all, and now you don’t have to worry about an otherworldly encounter with someone whose voice has been absorbed into your consciousness like water into a sponge. Your mind is at peace and now you can focus on the important things. The things that make sense.
That night you stare at your ceiling and do not sleep.
Thin rivers of salt water crawl down your face and you cannot close your eyes. And when the sun breaks over the rim of the world in an hour and you’re forced to show your face in it, you’re sure you’ll have thought of a reason to explain why your face looks the way it does.
The next night you go back to the beach.
You can go to whatever beach or cove or star speckled place on this planet you choose to. It’s your right, and you do not have to justify your actions to anyone. You don’t have to justify them to yourself or a stupid sea creature that may or may not exist and you certainly, absolutely, don’t have to justify it to the ancient part of your brain who is lazily shrugging its shoulders at you and telling you to be patient. It’s telling you that there are things in this life we cannot explain and even fewer that we can control, and when you stop wishing for something that’s when you’ll get it.
That advice is stupid and does not make sense and you wish it would shut up, you wish you would shut up. You wish that none of this had happened because it’s all been nothing but a complete waste of time and you hate wasting time, you hate it. You hate that you’re still thinking about this and that it happened and that it won’t happen again and your head, your stupid water clogged head is bulging from the inside out.
You pull to a screeching stop in the parking lot. You get out of your car and clamber and slip over the rocks towards the beach, cursing loudly as you slip and scrape your skin against them. You kick a small rock so hard that it splashes into the water and you dare him, you fucking dare him to throw it back at you but you know he won’t, because he’s a coward. He’s pathetic.
You tear your clothes off and dump them in a heap on the sand and stride and splash into the water. You swim fast and hard towards your spot and when you reach it you kick harder and pull the water behind you with fiercer and faster strokes that tear the muscles of your arms and you do not stop. You swim and swim and swim until your body rebels and you feel your movements slowing. The rage in your head thins and clears, and you hear yourself gasping for air. But you keep swimming. You swim and swim and swim because you can do whatever the fuck you want out here.
Stroke, kick, breathe; stroke kick breathe; this is your rhythm and your world now and you’re not going to stop for anything or anyone and you swim on and on and on.
Beneath an emotionless moon, in an ocean that’s bigger than every landmass on Earth combined, you swim out into its heart. Your anger and fear and pain is drawing you out into the open water more effectively than any riptide the ocean could deploy.
Stroke. Kick. Breathe. Stroke. Kick. Breathe. It’s difficult to do these things now. It hurts. Everything hurts. Your movements have lost their fluidity and their fire, and your body is shutting down. Your limbs are heavy uncoordinated lumps, and each breath is a raw gasp into your salt coated mouth. You need to stop. You need to take a break.
You slow to a stop and tread water. You focus on your breathing, and how starved of oxygen you are. It hurts to breathe and and it hurts not to, and now that you’ve stopped swimming you’re starting to feel cold. As you turn around to look back at the beach, you feel yourself shiver. And when you face the direction you’ve come from you feel yourself freeze.
The beach isn’t there.
You can’t see it.
Your eyes dart back and forth but you can’t see anything except water. No matter how many times you look you can’t see anything - a tree or a rock or a thin line of sand isn’t going to appear no matter how much you want it to or how hard you strain your eyes and there’s only water; water has eaten everything you once knew and that’s all you can see.
You’ve swum too far and too fast and now you’re going to die.
Your overworked heart dips into emergency reserves and pumps fire into your muscles. GO GO GO it screams in silent desperation. If you don’t move then you’re going to die. If you don’t get back to the beach then you’re going to die, so you really need to move and you need to start moving right. NOW.
You don’t know why you do it, or how you've overridden such overwhelming instincts, but you turn your head to take one last look at the center of the ocean.
A wall of water punches you in the face.
You cough and splutter and spit out sea water as best you can, but you’ve only got your mouth half clear of water before another fat wave fills it up again. You gag and retch and turn around and another one hits you. And then another. And another.
A battalion of waves have sprung up to attack you. They seem to be hitting you from all sides, but even in your panicked state you know that’s not possible. Waves travel in the same direction and are not sentient, and it’s not possible that they’ve been waiting for you to exhaust yourself before they attack you.
You start swimming to try and escape them but there is no escape. They batter you remorselessly in aquatic attack formation. You can see nothing but water, and you sob in acute despair when you realise you don’t know which direction you’re facing. You could be heading further out to sea instead of towards the beach.
A huge wave crests over you and seems to hang above your head, defying the laws of gravity as it looks down to pass sentence on you and you have just enough time to beg for forgiveness and gasp down a breath before it collapses on top of you and pummels you below the surface.
You’re immediately sent spinning in water so obscenely powerful it’s impossible. Life below the surface is not still and peaceful but it is calmer than above the surface, that’s just a fact. But not this time. This time the water is just as vengeful and powerful as it is on top and you don’t know why. But you do know there’s no escape and this is how you’re going to die.
You’re below the surface in a dark wet world with no up or down or left or right or sense of self just water, an onslaught of water, a never ending press of water that’s crushing your last breath out of your lungs and spinning you so fast you have no idea where the surface is and there’s no light or hope just water, just water and dark shapes and as you’re spun around you think you catch a glimpse of a dark humanoid shape with glistening scales and mechanical claws and burning red electrical eyes but on your next rotation towards death there’s nothing there just water, water dark water and shadows and a stream of air bubbles that could be yours even though you’re holding your breath so hard it hurts and--
And something harder presses into your waist.
Your oxygen starved thoughts sharpen and focus. The pressure around your waist is firm and warm and concentrated, as if it’s- as if it’s a pair of hands around you. As if there’s someone behind you holding you around the waist.
“You’re far from home tonight.”
Your eyes widen further at the feel of something soft against your ear.
Lips. It feels like lips are at your ear but that’s not possible. So it must be something else, like seaweed or an eel.
Whatever it is is smooth and soft, and it clamps down gently over your entire ear as if it’s about to swallow it whole. The voice that’s now in your head is so darkly delighted to find you in such a state.
“You won’t last long out here.”
Words cut through the roaring tumult of water effortlessly, and you can’t help but marvel at how clear and precise they are. They’re like a bell. Like a ringing bell at the break of a fresh dawn that you’ll never get to see.
Your trapped stale breath is screaming in your lungs and there’s nothing around you but a kaleidoscope of water and shifting shards of darkness and there’s a pressure, an equal pressure around your waist that feels like gripping hands, but you know it’s just the shape of the pitiless water taking shape around you before it claims you.
Thin lines of pure black eat into the edges of your vision.
You’re suffocating. You’re imagining things. You’re hearing things. You’re starved of air and dying and you’re hearing words of crystal clarity because they’re being spoken by yourself because you’re dying. Your brain is recapping your last living moments and that’s what you’re hearing. You’re dying by degrees and this world of water is soon to be your coffin and there’s no-one in it but you.
Whatever’s covering your ear presses up tighter against it and licks it.
The buildup of carbon dioxide in your blood is setting you on silent fire. It’s now only a matter of seconds before your subconscious trips its switch and you open your mouth to desperately suck down a breath, even though you know that will only speed up the moment of your death and not delay it.
What feels like a tongue but is really just your imagination then slithers inside your ear and licks is slowly.
And then your world stops spinning. You’re seeing straight for the first time since the wave pushed you underwater. You don’t know which direction you’re facing, but you’re finally facing one direction steadily. As if you’re being held in controlling place and in contemptuous defiance of everything the ocean could create.
“Soon.”
Your subconscious is telling you when you’re going to die.
“Return soon.”
And then you’re shooting through the water like an unauthorized nuclear rocket launch.
There is a propellent and a fire and you’re the insignificant payload with no control over your future and you’re streaming through the water so fast that it’s impossible. It’s just not possible to be moving this fast. You can’t be swimming because you have no energy or air left, and you can’t be held in the grip of someone who’s submerged from the depths because that makes no sense and is impossible. Impossible. You must be caught up in a reverse rip-tide, and that’s what’s carrying you so fast back towards the shore. You’re dangerously oxygen deprived and caught up in a rip tide that does not exist and-
-and you see it now. The shore. Through the ever hungry blackness eating into your vision, you see moonlight dappled trees and rocks shooting up towards you at an alarming speed.
But you’re underwater, so how can you see those things? You must be imagining them. You must be wishing for them. Maybe you’re dreaming. Maybe you’re already dead.
“But clean yourself first.”
In contrast to the velocity he’s hurtling through the water at, the words leaking into your ear are slow and calm and teasing.
And then you’re back on the beach.
You’re lying in shallow water on your back on the beach and looking up at the star spattered sky.
You suck in a deep breath as your lungs remember that’s their purpose, and you immediately roll onto your side and gag and choke and vomit up what seems like a gallon of seawater.
The cold white stars bore down on you remorselessly.
You collapse back onto the sand exhausted. You catch your breath and look up at the ink black sky that curves around the world and never ends. You grab fistfuls of gritty wet sand just because you can. Because you’re alive. Because you survived whatever freak occurrence happened out there. You reach up and touch your ear, the one you heard voices in, and grains of sand stick to it and you wonder where he is now and what he’s doing and how long you’re supposed to wait until you return.
You take a long deep breath through your nose and force your body into a sitting position. Your aching muscles protest every step of the way but you ignore them, and when it’s time to put your hands on the sand to help you stand back up on your feet, that’s when you exhale slowly through gritted teeth.
You look out over the calm and gentle water and feel a tugging behind your eyes. It’s like a net of fish hooks has been cast over your skull and they’re trying to pull you back in. Back out to sea, where the hidden killer waves live. Back out to the depths, where he is waiting for you to repay him.
No. Not he. Not anyone. Not anyone or anything that was sentient and speaking, no-one. There was No-One else out there.
You take a deep breath and feel your tortured lungs ache again but this time in a good way, and you focus on how your head feels like it’s being split apart and stitched back together simultaneously. You notice and then ignore what feels like a spattershot of liquid shards sinking into your chest to nestle into the cavity behind your heart.
It takes a lot of effort to turn around and head back towards your car, but you manage to. You should see a doctor and you really need a dentist, but first you need to sleep. Your body needs an emergency recovery and then a well tuned precise one. You drive back home on auto pilot and cannot remember setting off. You know that was dangerous. You know you’re struggling to care. There are so many things you don’t know that you wish you did. You collapse onto your bed and know that you don’t want to dream tonight.
That night you dream of nothing, and you wake up feeling sad.