The Beach - Part I - SCP Foundation

I

“Wake up.”

John brushed off the disembodied voice and buried himself deeper into his dream.

It was probably Karter or someone else from dispatch coming to get him for being twenty minutes late to his shift. The last person who was late caused the breach of a class five infohazard and the deaths of twelve brave men and women—all Gold Heart recipients after the ceremony, Site Command made sure everyone knew that. Perhaps it was Zaid Manvel, John’s boss, pink slip in hand, coming to give him his first ding on an otherwise spotless record. Another thought flashed briefly in his mind, that perhaps it was one of Ahab’s Best or some other Task Force, black like panthers, rifle trained on his forehead, orders buzzing in their ears: evacuate the block (or if the subject is unresponsive, kill on sight). The memory of Site-19’s infamous October Breach still left a burning hole in the conscience of those living on-site, even after all this time. It’s the reason most sleep with pocket knives or other sharp objects within arm's reach of the bed.

Bullet or incomprehensible horror. It might as well have been Overseer One itself standing above John. Nothing could compare to what his mind’s eye presently saw deep in the recesses of his soul.

It was an angel. An angel to rule them all. And it was dead on the beach.

The carcass was a fetid thing. Its putrid scent seemed to permeate time and space directly into John’s nostrils. Its mass was amorphous, made of bubbling pustules of oil and blubber. Too big to be anything of Earth’s oceans, the size of a small house. It looked to be made of wax, melted from some invisible candle wick atop its disgusting shape. Underneath its folds, John sensed form, structure, order. A skeleton of titanic strength and beauty. How he knew this he could not say. It was only a dream, after all.

John looked down to inspect his hands but found he was formless. His vision hovered five eleven off the sandy beach. Despite his masslessness, he felt the nip of the wind on his nose and ears and the pressure of the sand on his feet. So he walked, wearily at first, but with greater confidence as he neared the carcass. It was awful, yes, and repugnant. But it was dead, inert. A curiosity to be poked and prodded, like the stories he used to hear of fantastical beasts, washed ashore in some cold, desolate place, found by farmers or tourists, unexplainable by modern science. They were all dolphins or manatees, of course, half disintegrated by the saltwater or digested by the wildlife. Distorted beyond identification, but ultimately natural. Safe.

The thing on this beach, however, was unmistakable. To someone else, it could have been a great oak, charred by some ancient fire or lightning strike. It could have been a woman with eyes of steel, weeping for the dead and the terrors that yet live. But to John, it was the carcass of a beast he remembered from his childhood. A beast that, in a movie he could not recall the name of, had devoured a puppet made of wood who thought he was a boy. The Terrible Dogfish, he thought. It had given him nightmares once, as did all things born of the sea. Visions of churning, festering water, of slime and slush and the soup of life flashed before his eyes. Beasts beyond size and time, holding the Earth like a marble between shark teeth and baleen, letting it sink to the bottom of the universe to fester and rot in the brine. It had been years since he had pondered these thoughts, and for the first time in his adult life, John felt the adrenaline of deep, existential terror.

He screamed, reflexively raising his nonexistent hands to shield his eyes from the horror that the carcass implied. The beach, which once seemed to expand infinitely in every direction, suddenly felt a lot smaller. On one side: mountains reached impassively to the sky, blotting out the stars. On the other: a sheer wall of water, rolling like a cloud at impossible speed. And in the middle: John, the carcass, and the entire sum of all things, real and imagined, past and future, barreling at the speed of light down, down, all the way to the bottom, where the pressure is so great that everything becomes a single indistinguishable mass of blubber and oil.

John screamed and the carcass howled and the wave crested and crashed, rushed to his feet and

“WAKE UP!”

And John woke.

II

“Hey, John. You there? Wake up.”

The bedside intercom buzzed the shrill voice of Randal Karter, Chief Dispatcher of the night shift. John’s hand shot out from under the bedsheets like a rocket, missing the intercom’s receiver by a millimeter and sending the half-filled glass of water beside it on the nightstand spiraling to the floor.

He cursed and sat up, wiping the sleep from the corners of his eyes. His body was coated in a sheen of sweat, and his boxers clung to his skin like glue. He leaned over and flipped on the intercom’s receiver.

“Yeah Karter. I’m here.” He checked the time: 4:09 A.M. He wasn’t late, and that was good. He didn’t much like being late.

Something must have tripped the perimeter sensors, he thought.

Such occurrences happened more than he liked to admit. Site-184 was a tight operation, but things slipped through the cracks all the time. You run a big enough ship, you’re bound to get barnacles on the hull. It was inevitable. What’s not inevitable, though, is the speed at which you scrape them off. In the words of Chief Dispatcher Zaid Manvel, boss of the Intercom, every second the barnacle stays on the ship is ten minutes you’re gonna spend polishing the stain it leaves on the steel.

Except Zaid had replaced the word “barnacle” with “insurgent spy.”

John pressed the button again, stepping out of the bed and over the shards of glass stretching halfway across the cold floor. “Perimeter breach again? Do you need me for this?”

Karter’s voice spoke crystal-clear through the black-hashed speaker. “No, actually. Better. You should come see this.”

John lost his balance and cut his heel on the glass.

“Shit–”

“What? What happened?

“Nothing, Karter. Nothing. I’ll be right there.” He hung up. He’d have to sweep the glass up later. Randal Karter was aloof when it came to damn near everything—everything but surveillance. He had the eyes of an eagle and the attention span of a collegial math department, which is why he managed nearly every channel of video and intercom feed between the hours of twelve and six in the morning, every night for the past—well, as long as John had been on-site (which was going on two years come next spring). If something was so interesting that it got Karter excited… that would be something to see.

He threw on some clothes and walked out the door.

III

As he walked the frigid corridors of Site-184’s Administration Block, John couldn’t stop thinking of the visions he had seen mere minutes ago. The last moments of the dream, the wall of death flooding forth until it was inches from his face. And the sense that along that thin strip of land between the sea, the sky, and the mountains was something incomprehensible to the human mind, a presence so grand that it seemed to encompass the universe itself.

And that if the universe was on that beach with me, what is that beach? Where is that beach? He pushed the thought from his mind, but it clawed its way back in. It was only a dream, he thought. That dream seemed to scream back. Then why can’t I stop thinking of it?

Its timing had been impeccable. Just last week he had been informed of the formation of the Department of Cetacean Studies, which he briefed to Site Command along with the rest of the morning’s announcements. He had also heard, through various, non-official channels, of the incident in France, and the mad ramblings of the now-anomalous Lee Dupont.

Lee Dupont. The name sounded familiar. Someone from Maintenance? Dispatch interacted with nearly every division of the Site, but the names were easy to forget. He’d know if he saw his face. He was good with faces.

The hallway terminated at a nondescript black door, its tinted viewport obscured by crisscrossing wire reinforcements. The word DISPATCH was plastered at eye level in neat white paint. John gave three short knocks before swiping his card and letting himself in. The room was dingy, stained permanently by an ever-present cloud of cigarette smoke. Two men sat hunched over the CCTV feed. To the left was Karter, in his favorite black leather chair, dirty blonde hair slicked back. He was wearing a red bomber jacket, adorned with patches honoring the various teams he had served over the course of his work. Site-19 Night Hawks, Site-17 Graveyard, Area-02 Prowlers, MTF Gamma-Nine Eye in the Sky, and a half dozen more at least. Karter hadn’t been able to go one full day in his life without bringing up some patch of his in conversation, but John still didn’t know the stories behind half of them. One of his hands tapped anxiously on the table. The other held out a cigarette. Lighting it was Philip Morgen, Assistant Director of Site Security.

Though hunched over the table, Morgen towered over Karter by several inches. His slicked back dark hair, a widow’s peak. He was wearing, as he did most days, the standard security dress. Written across his back was an obnoxious reminder that he was indeed security, if his presence didn’t give it away. Morgen, himself a lifelong smoker, had tried on several occasions to quit for good on account of his rapidly deteriorating voice. The doctor had shown him an x-ray of his lungs, which had looked to him like the paper bags he used to burn holes into way back in the third grade. Sometimes he’d use those same bags to catch small vermin around the yard. Karma, Morgen thought, and so he quit the habit. Still, he eyed the lighter he used to set fire to Karter’s cigarette seductively, and thought of nothing but the small vermin.

Karter heard the door open, awkwardly spinning to face the shadow backlit from the pearly-white hallway. “Good, you’re here.” He waved John over. “Come take a look at this.”

John approached the cluttered desk. Ignoring the cigarette butts and half-crumpled cans of carbonated caffeine, the workspace was almost professional. Dispatch had about the budget of a small preschool, but it could still afford enough tech to keep the ship running. A sixth of the department’s funds must have been spent on the four 30-inch flatscreens arrayed on the wall, each showing twelve or so scenes of the facility. Various labs, alleys, and parking lots. Some showed anonymous woodland. And one screen, Camera 6B-11, which had not been used for any active security incident in the past decade, was flashing an obnoxious warning:

ACTION REQUIRED - PERIMETER BREACH

This particular camera showed a semicircle of sand, a stretch of beach a mile and a half to the west of Site-184, illuminated by a pair of ghostly floodlights. Beyond the arc of light was the inky blackness of the sea—only, it should have been blackness. On the horizon, just beyond the gentle crests of the choppy sea was a speck of light, bobbing up and down with the pulse of the waves.

It’s a Goddamn boat, John thought, which wouldn’t have been very strange if it wasn’t for the fact that Site-184 was forty miles from the nearest population center and protected by several redundant tripwire surveillance systems that would have told them if something as big as a small porpoise got within a half-mile of Camera 6B-11. Whatever this boat is, it either sliced through several state-of-the-art submerged pressure sensors, or it’s open season for the whitecoats down at the Anomalous Vehicle labs.

“You look like shit. Rough night?” Karter asked over his shoulder, eyes still fixed on the flickering white dot in the sea of black.

“Yeah, just a…” An image of the wave flashed in his mind, followed by the stench of the carcass. “Just a bad dream. What is it?” The two men at the table continued to stare intently at the screen, Karter with burning curiosity and a touch of fear, and Morgen with a haze one gets right before a bar fight.

The two of them had a long enough history of dealing with trespassers—the rest of dispatch called it “playing fetch”—that they had begun to develop trades within the craft. Once the suspect could be identified (it was usually a lost tourist or thrillseeker, never anything really worth anyone’s time, but protocol’s protocol), the two would intervene. Karter would be soft-spoken, the voice of reason. A camper, or a park ranger. Once he pretended to be an intern for a film studio, coming to notify a wandering elderly couple that they were stepping onto the set of a nature documentary. This setup worked in most cases. The security breach would walk itself home, and everyone was happy, no amnestics required. But one suspect, a twenty-something-year-old conspiracy blogger and UFO hunter, didn’t feel like playing along with Karter’s “sorry sir, this here’s restricted federal land,” and “I’m going to need you to turn around and head back up the street please,” and had decided to pull a pocket pistol he had bought from a friend the week before. He managed to get one shot off, grazing the shoulder of a very surprised Karter before being shot in the head by a very thrilled Morgen. An ever-growing part of Morgen wished every fetch could end the way it did that day.

Karter tapped the screen. “It’s some kind of vessel, I think. Looks like it could be a fishing boat… We don’t have much intel in that region, some kind of blind spot for the sensors. I’ll have to bring it up with Command after we’re through here.”

“Is it Civvie?” It was almost always civilian, but it felt good to ask.

Karter shrugged. “Probably. We need to go down there and check. If it was something else it would’ve done something, anything by now. I’ve been watching it for some time, and it hasn’t moved.”

Morgen spoke, reminding everyone he was still paying attention. “What if it’s a distraction? You know, a sting, to get us out there so they can get the jump on us?”

“You’d like that wouldn’t you,” John said, not so jokingly. “Well, we going to take care of this or what?”

Morgen smiled his horrible grin. “Yeah, we’ll take care of this. Bruce has the speeder ready. Get your gun.”

IV

The ride out to the phantom light was quiet, save for the mindless hum of the SCPF Rascal, a 30-foot speedboat, the kind you’d find with the coast guard or maybe the cartel. It had a range long enough to check up on little errands like these, but too short for anything substantive. Big enough to get the job done, too small to do it comfortably. The four men rode in cramped silence. Three of them, John, Morgen, and Karter, sat along the edge of the boat. The fourth was Agent Bruce Mitchell, who stood at the helm in awkward silence as the boat flopped and splattered over the waves.

Bruce Mitchell was a fat man, head balder than an egg, his face half obscured by a comically large mustache. John thought it looked fake, but who would ever fake a mustache as gaudy as that? Bruce was the sole operator of the SCPF Rascal. He had practically built the thing, giving it as much personality possible without sullying its inconspicuousness. Around the steering wheel and underneath the dashboard were countless stickers; insignias of bands and national parks graffitied the inside of the boat like the underbelly of a skateboard. Unlike Karter, Bruce never talked about any of them. He didn’t talk much at all, except when it was someone telling him which way to steer the boat, or where to park it. Still, John sensed strange intelligence underneath Bruce’s antisocial silence. They might’ve been friends, in another lifetime.

The quiet did give John some much-appreciated time to think. He closed his eyes, trying to ignore the curious stares of Karter and Morgen. His mind wandered in the dark, reaching out for the ever-slipping memory of that phantom dream. He thought of the sensations.

The sand, the spray, he gritted his teeth, the stench of the carcass.

It was fading fast. The sensation of utter totality that had crushed his soul into a fine dust just hours before was now only a tinge of pain. This should have provided him some comfort, but it only left him feeling cold and hollow. Like some part of him was still on that beach, bracing for the impact of that cyclopean wave. I have to go back. I have to see the carcass. There is more. There is so much more. The beach stretches on and on and on and on and

Voices. John pulled his mind from its recesses and came to back on the speedboat. It felt like coming out of a dream. Karter was saying something to Morgen.

“—need to be careful about this. We’ve got no intel, no countermeasures. Backup’s a good twenty minutes out, if they can even get our calls from here.”

“Relax, Karter, it's probably one of the locals. Drifted a bit too far from the good fishing spots,” Morgan laughed as he pulled his sidearm from its holster. He gave it a look over before continuing. “But if things go south, well, when have I ever failed you before?”

John spoke up. “Have the boat on idle, Bruce. I want a clean exit pathed for us in case we need to bail. Don’t want anyone dying if it doesn’t have to come to that.”

The ship was closer now, the glow of its single light flickered dimly over the tips of the waves. As it neared, John got a closer look. The thing looked cartoonish, like a tugboat from the 40s. Pale, frayed lifebuoys hung along the ship’s railing. A single smokestack huffed black plumes, which blended effortlessly into the night sky. Its bow arched comically toward the sky, revealing a deep, black hull. The ship couldn’t have been longer than fifty or sixty feet, but its presence felt monumental, like looking up at the base of a skyscraper. Across its hull were dusty brass portholes, each the color of the night air. After a moment of confusion, John found he couldn’t count them. Or rather, he could count them, but his mind would glaze over after he reached six or seven. It was as if the ship stretched on and on, past the horizon to places unknown. John couldn’t take it all in at once, despite how hard he concentrated. It was as if the space the ship occupied was not supposed to be there, yet was. The thought was terrifying, so he shut it out. He let his eyes settle on the sole shining light atop the deck. It looked to be a lamp of sorts, moving with the sway of the ship.

“Pull’er around, Bruce. We’ll board from the other side.” Morgen was standing, one leg propped up on the edge of the boat. He’d get a fight tonight, one way or another. Karter sensed it too but knew there was no use stopping him. Besides, there was always the possibility that this wasn’t a lost fisherman, and that this fetch could quickly escalate and become a Big Deal, in which case he might be thanking Morgen for his itchy trigger finger.

Bruce let out a grunt of acknowledgment and spun the speedboat’s wheel hard to the left. The boat drifted, maintaining its momentum as it wrapped around the front of the Dread Ship. The act terrified John to his core, and he shielded his eyes with one hand. He’d been lucky. He hadn’t seen an active Cognitohazard since the rudimentary ones they gave out during basic training; the simple glyphs that made your ears sting or cause blood to spill from your nose. Now he knew. This is what it feels like.

The others hadn’t seemed to notice. Their faces were alert, yes, scanning the ship for signs of an ambush. But they lacked the visage of dread that slowly crept up John’s face. Their boat was now parallel to the ship. Karter reached up its hull, affixing one end of a climbing rope to the ship’s guardrails. He hoisted himself up, then turned back to extend a hand to John. He took it and was lifted to the ship’s deck.

Empty, he thought. Or maybe not. He flashed a look to Karter which seemed to say, I’ll have a look around. Karter nodded, then turned to help Morgen. The ship felt strangely artificial, like something out of a museum of industrial-era seacraft. None of this equipment works. It looked like it did, and he indeed felt the gentle hum of motorization beneath his feet, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all an illusion; that at any moment the curtain would be pulled back, and he would find himself not on a ship but on the deck of some unknowable, esoteric machine. This place is death.

The ship looked empty, though. John paced around but found no signs of life. It swayed gently with the waves; every so often it would dip too hard to the left or right and a thin vapor of ocean spray would mist the deck. John could see now that it wasn’t very big, but it still hurt his head to concentrate on the ship’s dimensions. In the center was something like a cabin, which connected to the smokestack and probably led to the engine somewhere below deck. John was reminded of an old cartoon he’d seen as a boy, where a monochrome mouse whistled gleefully in an eerily similar cabin. He never did trust that mouse, and he certainly didn’t trust this cabin.

Next to the pale white bulkhead that led into the cabin was a flickering oil lamp. The lamp looked ancient; years of saltwater spray had turned its gold-colored metal to a rusty red. It dripped a line of black paste, which pooled on the deck underneath it in a sickly iridescent puddle. John felt a tinge of recognition at this, and thought back to the oily, fetid carcass on that beach. The flame inside cast dancing shadows across the deck. Etched into a small brass plate beside the bulkhead was an inscription:

THE SAILOR

A jolt shot down John’s spine, yet he did not know why. Something about those words brought forth some innate fear within him, as if he had relived some traumatic childhood memory, like an arachnophobe seeing a tarantula on the back of her hand. He knew what was beyond the door, as surely as he knew his own name. He knew he must enter and confront whatever lay on the other side. There was no way around it. It would spell death, surely for others but perhaps even for him.

It was now cold and raining, and his breath came out in hot white puffs.

“This place is fucking creepy. What’s that up there?” Morgen appeared on John’s left, gun drawn.

“Cabin, I think.” John could not say for certain what was really behind that door, but it sure as hell wasn’t a cabin.

Karter held back, sweeping his eyes back and forth across the deck. Karter might’ve been smart enough to know something was wrong here. Maybe he felt the sting at the back of his head whenever he tried to picture the ship in its totality. But he was not a memeticist, had no training with glyphs of madness or knowledge of their functions, and so he was blind. I cannot save them from what’s to come.

“Move, I’ll handle this one.” Morgen pushed past, pressing his ear to the bulkhead’s cold metal. He waited a moment, face contorted in concentration, listening for the clang of footsteps and the sound of movement. All he heard was a hushed, rhythmic rustling he couldn’t quite place. Behind him, Karter gazed back and forth, back and forth, every few passes noticing new rusty pipes, broken dials, frayed bits of rope and cloth strewn across the ship’s deck. His eyes grew wide, and he choked back a scream. Somewhere down at the surface of the water, Bruce leaned idly against the wheel of the Rascal as a cold sweat broke out on his bald head. The hair on his arms stood straight up, and, for a brief moment, the cool intelligence John had thought he’d seen in the man poked through his hazy eyes, and he felt fear the likes of which he’d never known in his most harrowing of nightmares.

Morgen reached for the door’s handle. John felt every urge to speak, to stop the act he knew would condemn them all to death, but his body was frozen. Tears began welling in his eyes, and he felt the crushing presence of fate on his shoulders. This is how things were meant to be, as it was decided eons ago and eons from now.

“I’m sorry,” he managed to croak under his breath.

A momentary sign of confusion, or perhaps contemplation, flashed across Morgen’s face as he pulled the handle. The door glided effortlessly, its rusty hinges making no sound as the bulkhead cracked open. A fan of white light shot out from where the door split from the cabin. Morgen, realizing everything all too late, used his weight to slam the bulkhead shut, but it swung out fast and hard with a mind of its own. It knocked into the terrified Morgen, sending him reeling back with a wet thud. Blinding light poured over the ship like a supernova, spilling out across the sea and bleeding into the sky. John let it bathe over him. For a brief moment, before his mind was ripped from his body, he saw beyond the door what he knew was there, but couldn’t articulate: a green sea, full of monsters, lapping expectantly against a long, flat beach.

V

John awoke on the beach. He recognized instantly the scent of salt in the air, the cool breeze against his cheek. He looked down and saw his body.

Am I dead?

The beach was as bleak as he remembered it being. On his left was the sea, coated in a thick fog that prevented vision past a few hundred feet. On his right, the black bases of mountains, their tips hidden from view. Up was only a sea of grey, but he knew above him was the moon and stars and things beyond comprehension. He knew what lay in front of him, but resisted looking as long as he could. The stench burned his eyes, and he didn’t know how long he could gaze upon the carcass before it would begin to fray his sanity. But then he heard a voice.

“Care to sit, stranger? Catch your breath?”

John spun, arms reflexively taking a defensive stance. A few feet behind him sat a man at a campfire. He looked like he just walked off the set of Deadliest Catch, dressed head to toe in dirty yellow rubber, a fisherman’s dress. His clothes were torn in places, coated in a permanent sheen of water and grime. He was old, but he looked much older. The contours on his face told a long story baked in sea salt. Wiry white hair poked out from under his floppy yellow bucket hat. He bit the end of a chewed-up pipe, long since having burned off what little tobacco it once carried. He sat on a piece of splintered driftwood, the only aberration on this pristine beach John could see. Besides that carcass, he reminded himself.

The campfire was dying, coughing up the last bits of ash as it burned through the crumpled newspaper and pine needles used for its fuel. The man held a stick over the flame, which skewered a piece of white flesh from some foreign animal.

“Sit,” he said. “Or would you rather keep looking at that thing?” He gestured to the carcass.

John cautiously lowered himself near the fire. It seemed to glow brighter in recognition, if only for a moment. The two sat in silence, with only the pops of the fire to break the still air.

The man held up the stick. “Hungry?”

John said nothing. There had been too much excitement for hunger to be an issue, but eventually his biology would catch up to him.

The man laughed. “I don’t blame you, this stuff tastes like poison. Gets better with salt.” He reached into his coat and pulled out a pinch of fine white dust. He powdered the meat and ate it all in a single bite. “Chewy too.” He broke the empty stick over his knee and threw it into the fire.

After a moment, John spoke.

“What is this?” He said it more like a statement of fact than a question. Part of him knew the answer already. This is the beach. The beach you used to dream of as a kid. Remember? Out there be monsters, with fins like knives and teeth that shred steel. Red sky at night, sailors’ delight. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.

“I think you know that already,” the man said in a wispy voice. “A better question would be ‘who am I?’ Search your mind, I’m not supposed to be here.” Indeed he wasn’t. Of every vision, every fleeting memory of this place since the days of kickball on the field, John had stood on these sands alone. The thought of another sitting here with him should have terrified him to the core, but the man’s presence was soothing. A reminder of his sanity.

The man held up his hands. “Don’t worry, I’m just passing through. A traveler. I’m here because of that.” He pointed to the carcass, reminding John of its stench. “I could smell it an ocean away, couldn’t help myself from taking a peek. I think that there carcass might be a gen-u-ine Angel. We don’t see many of those anymore. Usually it's just Apostles—the real fun ones die out at sea, too deep for harvesting. This stretch of beach might just be the jackpot, boy.”

The man’s words flowed over John. He was only half listening—his attention fully on the bends and folds of the carcass. His mind was struggling, and failing, to recreate what it must have looked like in life.

“Stop it, or you’ll lose your mind.” John snapped back, and turned to face the man.

“Is this all real? It can’t be, I… I thought it was all just–”

“A dream? Does this look like a dream?” He laughed a wheezy chuckle. “I’m afraid not. You’re where we all go when we die.”

“Is this Hell?”

“Or Heaven, maybe. I haven’t decided.”

“But I’ve seen this place before… I know this place. I’ve always known. You even said yourself I know where I am.”

The man grunted. “I’m not pulling your leg, if that’s what you're asking. I saw this place too before I woke up here, in my dreams. This place is funny like that.”

“And what is ‘this place’?”

The man gave an impatient look, like John had just asked what color the sky is. Of course John knew. This place was Earth. But not from my time. That was a limp answer, though, and he knew it. There was more to it than that, but he didn’t think this man had the answers. One question still burned in his mind.

“Are you ‘The Sailor?’”

The man looked up, confused. “How do you mean?”

“Well, before I woke up here, I was on a ship. I saw a door. It had ‘The Sailor’ written next to it.”

The man shrugged. “First I’ve heard of it.”

John sat back, defeated. This was the first time he had relaxed his body, and he was beginning to realize how exhausted he really was. Could I really be dead? Do the dead get sore? It was shocking how fast John’s old life was slipping from memory. Dispatch seemed like a lifetime away.

“Hey, um, why don’t you get some rest? You look like you might fall over. I’ll see if I can catch something in the meantime. Tomorrow we’ll harvest that whale and get out of here. Don’t want to stick around until something else catches scent of that thing.”

John was too weak to protest. He laid his head back against the driftwood and gazed absently into the fire.

The man spoke up. “You know, I never caught your name. Mine’s Irving.” He extended a withered hand.

John fought off sleep long enough to reach out and meet it with his own. “John Delmar.”

And then he was out.

VI

Somewhere far away, a ship the color of night reared its ugly head. It feasted on the bodies of three men, their eyes wide and empty, faces holding suspended screams. The fourth was elsewhere, having survived the madness of the door.

The Sailor was called from the void, the Dread Ship thought. It would have survived the journey. Its metal creaked and rattled. It was old. Eons old. It was tired. But there was more work to be done.

And so it turned, its face pointing toward the location of the next, its mind in full anticipation for the day it might return home, to the place of green seas and monsters.

{$previous-title}

The Beach

Part II