On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 150, of 240 so far.

Talking to the Lights

The marina was always peaceful at this hour, and that’s why Jeremy tried to be tying up at around this time whenever possible.

Today was no exception, and with the last golden light of late afternoon upon the waves, he felt entirely at peace as he went around the boat setting everything to rights and doing his usual tidy.

His last charter of the day was thankfully a quiet and respectable affair; just a group of three older men wanting a shot at catching some wild salmon. They’d managed it too, after only a couple of hours out, and nobody had drank very heavily. There was almost nothing to tidy up, and to Jeremy’s great relief, nothing at all to clean.

He’d had a bad one a couple of weeks earlier, with a drunk bunch of twenty-somethings who seemed to view the whole idea of a fishing charter as quaint and amusing. In the end they’d just asked him to cruise them up and down the inlet and out around the bay for a while, and he’d been glad to oblige, but one of the girls and two of the boys couldn’t hold their cheap and sugary booze, so there’d been a mop and bucket job at the end of it all. It wasn’t Jeremy’s first, but every time he swore it would be his last.

Nobody who was born after the internet came along, he would always say. One time he’d mentioned it to an older customer, and had been told that the internet had actually been around since the eighties or so, albeit just in academic circles. He said that suited him and his new rule just fine, and both of them had laughed about it.

But young people had money to burn and nothing better to burn it on, so sooner or later he always took another charter from a party group, then dealt with the consequences later.

He sighed, pushing those thoughts away. Today had been just fine, the boat was squared away, and he wasn’t quite yet hungry or tired. He could afford to do his favourite thing, which was to sit out on the rear deck and just smell the air and the water, and remind himself that at any moment he could just turn around and disappear over the horizon if he wanted to.

“Feels like the whole ocean is yours,” came a voice to his right, and Jeremy looked around in surprise.

A larger but older boat was berthed in the next stance, and on its upper deck was a man who must have been seventy-five if he was a day. The man was still trim, but his face showed the work of the sun and the spray for decades past. His eyes were still bright, though, and his face was friendly.

“That’s exactly it,” Jeremy replied. “Now that the people who pay the bills have gone home, anyway.” The old man smiled and nodded.

They struck up an amicable conversation, initially about their respective experience on the waves and all of the places they’d each gone. Late afternoon became early evening, and Jeremy found himself on the man’s boat instead of his own, both of them sitting up top and looking out towards the blue-black waves, enjoying a companionable couple of beers.

The man’s name was Ed, and he had been in the merchant navy for most of his career, retiring ten years earlier to spend more time with his wife. She had sadly passed away the year before last, though, and so the old man found that he preferred to spend his time on the water once again, because it gave him the subconscious sense that whenever he came back, she might still be there waiting for him just as she always had been.

“Let me ask you something, youngster,” Ed said, and Jeremy laughed out loud. He was almost fifty, and it had been a long time since anyone had called him young. But he supposed that it was true enough, relatively speaking.

“Go on then,” he replied, and the other man nodded, but remained silent for a few seconds before speaking again.

“What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen?” Ed asked, gesturing with the small brown bottle of beer towards the waves that were now almost black, with some of the stars visible above them.

Jeremy frowned, thinking about it. “I saw some ocean fire once,” he replied. “Little flame sitting right there on the water, like in a swamp. Creepy, but I’d heard of it before I ever saw it, and it went out quick enough. And one time I saw a little fishing boat way out; must have been forty miles from port. The kind of size you’d take out on a lake. Rods were still there, bait box, a thermos and a lunchbox. Nobody there.”

Ed nodded. “Seen some of those,” he said. “Coastguard mostly don’t do anything about it, do they?”

“I called it in after checking around a little,” Jeremy replied. “They said they’d look into it. I didn’t get the feeling they were going to look too hard, but you never know. I didn’t see any of their craft on my return trip, anyway.”

The two men were silent for a while, thinking, and then Jeremy spoke. “What about you, Ed? What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen out there?”

When the old man made no sound, Jeremy turned to look at him, and saw that his weathered brow was furrowed, and his eyes had dulled. Something was troubling him. Jeremy was about to retract his question, but Ed seemed to sense it, and waved his hand.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Ed replied at last. “And you’ll think I’m an old fool whose mind has started to go, or maybe that I drank when I was out at sea and made the whole thing up. But the only thing you’d be right about would be the old fool part.”

Jeremy gave a wan smile, intrigued, and knowing from instinct that this was not a time for a laugh or a remark. He waited, and soon Ed began to talk, his eyes focused somewhere out on the water they could now hardly see.

“This would be thirty-odd years back,” he began. “I suppose I would have been your age, come to think of it. We were out in the Greenland Sea, going east, a day past our last port. Was maybe three in the morning, and I was on watch. I didn’t mind it at all, despite the miserable cold. The aurora was everywhere. It was like sailing into space.”

I’d love to have seen that, Jeremy thought but didn’t say.

“There was another man on watch too, but he was below at the time, getting something to eat,” Ed continued. “I’d been alone for maybe ten minutes. I was looking out there at the sky, of course, not just the water. The sea was every colour from the sky, especially since there was some surface ice too. It was like jewels. More jewels than you’ve ever seen. Incredible. Beautiful.”

His eyes were unfocused, and he was clearly seeing the memory. There was the faintest smile on Ed’s face, and then his expression darkened. He frowned, and it was almost like a wince.

“I saw… something on the sea,” he said. “It happened quick. The water, it sort of… fell away. Looked like god had pulled out the bath plug, but too fast for that. And there was no current from it. It must have been a mile wide. Just dropped away into nothing.”

He shook his head, and took a long pull from his beer. Jeremy just watched him, questions flitting through his mind.

“And no,” Ed said suddenly, “it wasn’t a trick of the light. Wasn’t cloud shadow — clear sky. I could see it better than I can see you right now. A big piece of the ocean just went down below, leaving a hole. And it didn’t churn the rest of the sea at all. The drop-off was like a cliff-edge made of glass.”

“What happened?” Jeremy asked, and he was dismayed to see the old man’s hands shaking a little.

“What happened is that I heard something,” Ed replied, his voice quieter now. “There was no wind, and the sea was calm enough. Engines don’t make much noise above deck. So if somebody had clapped their hands two hundred feet away, I’d have heard it no problem.”

Jeremy nodded. “But that’s not what you heard,” he said, and Ed shook his head.

“I heard something down there, down where the water had fallen in. Something big. Like a vibration, deep, but I could hear it too. Nothing I could understand, but not just noise either. Words. Words like a… a mountain would speak. Or worse.”

Jeremy felt a chill run down his spine, and he knew that there were goosebumps on his forearms. “What did you do?” he asked after a long moment, and the old man made a choked sort of noise before shaking his head again.

“I turned and ran back into the wheelhouse like a terrified little girl-child, is what I did,” he replied. “I went below. Found my watchmate. Scared him half to death, and of course he insisted on coming up on deck right away. When we got back up there the sea was flat and quiet. No sign of it.”

Ed could see the question written on Jeremy’s face, and he shrugged. “I played it off as a damned joke. I think I wanted it to be a joke. I wanted to scream, too, and I don’t mind telling you that. But the lad told me to go to hell, and I laughed like a madman because if I didn’t, I think I would have cried.”

Jeremy looked away, allowing him a moment. Ed’s voice was taut, and it had wavered a little towards the end. No matter what he had told his long-ago colleague, he hadn’t been joking at all.

Ed drained the rest of the bottle and set it down harder than he’d meant to. It tipped over, and rolled noisily to the base of a railing post. Neither man paid it any heed. Several minutes passed, and Jeremy was on the brink of changing the subject when Ed turned to look at him. His face was pale, and his voice was a whisper.

“The aurora changed when it spoke,” he said. “Whatever was down there, it was talking to the lights.”

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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