When he walked into my office it looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks. He was middle-aged, probably in his thirties, wearing what looked like an old jean jacket and a baseball cap. He kept looking around the room, nervous, scared. He sat in the chair in front of me after we introduced ourselves.

“Why don’t you tell me why you’re here.”

“What do you mean?” He asked. “This is all court-mandated, isn’t it?”

I nodded, “I meant why don’t you tell me why it is that you burned down your house.”

“I didn’t file the insurance claim if that’s what you’re asking.”

“No, I’m just here to try to understand the psychology behind your, well, decisions.”

“You’ll think I’m nuts.”

“Insurance claim or not, what you did was illegal and very dangerous.”

“Not letting the damn thing burn was more dangerous.”

I smiled. Now we were getting somewhere. He was tapping his leg fast, his eyes wildly jumping all over the room.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

He watched me, no words coming from his mouth. I waited. These were the moments when keeping silent are key. I knew he’d eventually break and start speaking.

It took nearly three minutes of uncomfortable staring, but he finally spoke:

“You ever hear about Amityville house?”

“The haunted one?”

He nodded. “They say it was the most haunted house in America.”

“I think they made a movie about it,” I said.

“They did.”

“What about the house?”

“Mine was worse.”

“Haunted?”

Again he was quiet, so I tried pressing a little further.

“You didn’t own the house very long,” I said.

“You watch scary movies a lot?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“You see how they ramp up the hauntings usually? They’ll make a toy move here, a drawer open there, then little by little worse stuff starts happening.”

“Yes, then they have a big conclusion,” I said.

“That’s not how it works in real life.”

I looked down at my notes, then back at the man in the chair. He was standing at full alert, staring at the wall behind me. There was something strangely eerie about the way he was watching, as if he expected something to move. For a moment I felt desperate to look, to make sure nothing was there. I shook my head subtly, trying to get that feeling out of my head.

“Says here you owned the house for only two weeks,” I said. “You stayed there how long?”

“Slept there one night.”

“And in one night you decided to burn the place to the ground?”

“I did after it… after it happened.”

“Why don’t you tell me what happened exactly,” I said.

But the man was still staring at the wall behind me. The feeling came back immediately, a serious need to just look behind me, to make sure I was safe. I did my best to ignore it.

“Excuse me,” I said, but he ignored me. “Sir.”

That did it. He looked away from the wall and back at me, confused for a moment.

“Tell me what happened in that house.”

“Well, alright,” he began. “It was cold. Very cold. I thought the heat was broken or something. But it wasn’t the heat. The house had a fireplace, but the fire didn’t work. It was cold.”

“You noticed that when?”

“As soon as we moved in. It was a cold night, we needed to keep warm somehow. Things were happening from the moment we moved the last box from the truck. Boxes went missing. My wife, she set up the kitchen, had everything neat and tidy, all the forks and spoons and knives in the drawers. I called her over to help me set up the TV and when she went back the whole kitchen was upside down. Giant mess, everything on the floor, cabinets off their hinges, chairs completely cleaved in two. She was upset, she was very upset.”

I scribbled down everything the man said.

“First one to see it was my daughter.”

“Your daughter who is…”

“Dead, yes,” he said fighting back a tear. He closed his eyes tight and continued to speak. “She was watching TV, had just set it up. Where she was, the couch in the living room wasn’t pushed up against a wall or anything, there was space behind it. I guess she saw it once the TV turned black for a moment, you know how TV’s do when there’s a commercial or something. She was sitting on the couch, and it turned black for a second and she could see it on the screen, in the reflection. It was standing behind her.”

He was looking at the wall behind me again, and this time I couldn’t resist. His story had sent chills down my spine almost immediately. I turned around, but there was nothing there. When I turned back the man was smiling.

“Oh don’t worry, it can’t get you.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“I know the words, you see?”

“What words?” I asked. But I had a feeling I knew what he was about to tell me. When he’d been found by the firemen that night they’d reported he’d been repeating some sort of gibberish over and over.

“They’re protection,” he said. “You want to learn them?”

I nodded, and the man smiled again. “Say them out loud, you only need to say them once, and they’ll keep you safe.”

As skeptical as I was, his story and the way he kept looking behind me had made me nervous. I agreed to say them, figuring that any protection, real or not, might not hurt. I invited anyone reading this to repeat the words too. Hopefully, they’ll keep you safe.  

“Repeat after me, Thinso.”

“Thinso.”

“Kedwi.”

“Kedwi.”

“Seeth.”

“Seeth.”

“Ya.”

“Ya.”

“Mesco.”

“Mesco.

“Thinso Kedwi Seeth Ya Mesco.”

“Thinso Kedwi Seeth Ya Mesco,” I repeated. I held my breath, waiting. Would something happen? We sat in silence for what felt like an hour, but nothing happened. I almost started laughing at my own silliness.

“Did you expect something to happen?” Asked the man.

I shrugged, “I guess so! Did I do something wrong?”

“No, like I said, it’s just for protection. Just saying it once is enough. Now it won’t get you.”

I nodded, sighed, and looked back down at my notes. There was still a lot to talk about.

“Tell me about your wife,” I said.

“Well, she loved our daughter,” he said. “She wasn’t herself.”

“I have a statement from you that says your wife woke in the night.”

The man nodded, “I woke up when I heard a loud banging coming from the hallway. Thought maybe it was the cat. But no, it was my wife. She’d gotten up about an hour earlier and was standing there in her pajamas. She was hacking at the wall with a cleaver. Took me a minute to notice she was covered in blood.”

“Is that how…”

“She didn’t do it, my wife was dead by that point.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was finishing up some work downstairs before I went to bed, you see? I heard a commotion in our room, my wife was showering so I figured she must have fallen. When I got up there, she was in bed. Wide awake but totally quiet.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t either at first, but now I know. I went downstairs for a bit to finish up my work and when I came back upstairs, I kissed my wife goodnight. She was cold. I thought it was because the house was freezing. But no, that wasn’t it. She was dead. I kissed and slept next to my wife’s body for a few hours, and then it got up and went to the kitchen.”

“That’s where it, she, grabbed the knife?”

“Cleaver.”

“And then?”

“Well, it went for my daughter.”

“I see.”

“So am I crazy, or what?”

I frowned, “well, there’s a lot to unpack here. The trauma you went through that night, your wife, your daughter… it’s hard not to see why you’d start a fire.”

“You still remember the words?” Said the man.

“Thinso Kedwi Seeth Ya Mesco. What do they mean?” I asked.

But the man only smiled, then suddenly stood up and walked to the door. Without another word he opened it and walked out of my office.

I couldn’t sleep that night. For hours I tossed and turned in bed, feeling unusually cold. Then there was the clock. It was an old analog alarm clock I’d been gifted years ago. That night its ticking was unusually loud. Every single moment I thought I might be able to finally fall into a deep sleep, I could hear it ticking. Nothing made the sound go away, not even when I finally put it inside the drawer on my nightstand. As soon as I got comfortable the ticking started again. An incessant tiktok, tiktok, that hurt my brain.

I turned back and forth in my bed and hid my face under the pillow until I couldn’t take it anymore. The ticking was unceasing and constant, counting me down to something. For another hour I heard it ticking from inside my wardrobe where I’d placed it in the hope that I’d finally get some quiet and rest. But nothing worked. The wardrobe’s wood amplified the ticks.

Frustrated, I turned on the lights in my room and went to the wardrobe. I grabbed the clock and moved it to the bathroom outside my bedroom and closed the door. Then I closed my bedroom door for good measure and got into bed.

I saw it run under the bed right as I turned off the lights. I wasn’t completely sure what I’d seen for a moment, just a sudden movement that seemingly came out of nowhere, a dark blur. I felt a terror rise through me and send a cold shock that settled down near the tip of my spine. My mind immediately went to the words I’d spoken in my office. Thinso Kedwi Seeth Ya Mesco. I repeated them in my head as I noticed how cold my room really was.

“Thinso Kedwi Seeth Ya Mesco,” I whispered out loud.

I inched forward, holding my breath as I grabbed onto the sheets and leaned down to get a look. Something had definitely crawled in there. I could hear it. I felt the blood rush to my head as I turned my body upside down. I counted back from three and pulled back the duvet.

And there, from the opposite side of the bed, was a head staring back at me. It was in the exact same position that I was, looking down at me from my bed too. Whatever it was had somehow gotten in bed with me while I was moving and had somehow mimicked my movement from the other side. Then something grabbed my leg.

“Fuck!” I screamed and dived out of the covers, and straight to the ground. In seconds I had pushed myself back into the wall. I looked up at the bed. Nothing. I looked down. Nothing. I couldn’t see the entire bed from where I was.

I screamed when my phone rang. I don’t know why, but it somehow suddenly felt like a massive comfort, so I jumped to my feet and lunged for the bedside table where it sat vibrating away.

“Hello?” I said. I looked around the room and turned on the lights. The room was empty. I breathed.

“Yeah, hi. We’re calling about a patient, the girl from the house fire?”

“What about her?”

“She just woke up.”

“Woke up? No, I thought she had died.”

“No, she’s alive, just barely managed it too. A bit hysterical, though, we were hoping to get your professional opinion.”

I nodded, completely flustered. How had she survived her mother, that thing, how was she alive?

“I’ll be right there,” I said.

She was covered in burns. Nearly all of her body was hidden under layers of gauze and slimy-looking gel. She just barely managed to turn her head when I walked in.

“Who are you?” She asked. I could see she was in an immense amount of pain, even just moving her jaw enough to speak looked like the biggest effort imaginable.

“I’m a therapist. I spoke to your dad.”

“My dad?”

“Yes. Is he here? I’d like to have a word with him too.”

“How did… when did you talk to him?”

“Just this afternoon,” I said. “He came to my office. We spoke for an hour.”

“Are you sure that was my dad?”

“Yes, he told me he burned your house down, told me your mother attacked you, said you saw something standing behind you on the TV.”

“No, that’s not…” and suddenly her eyes widened, and a look of utter horror and shock appeared on her face.

“Did you say the words?” She asked.

“What?”

“Everything it told you was a lie. None of that happened. It just wants you to say the words.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Don’t you see? It loves toying with people. It wants you to say the words. Once you say the words it knows where you are. It will find you and take you.”

I looked at her, suddenly realizing what I had done.

“I…”

“It tricked you. Just like it tricked my family. Just like it likes to trick everyone else. It likes to play with its victims, and it’s getting smarter.”

My sister and I used to love coming home from school and running off into those woods. We’d go exploring, play dumb little adventure games, and would just generally mess around the way kids do.

I’ll never forget the day it happened. It was a late summer afternoon, and we were supposed to go out looking for salamanders in the stream that ran about a half mile from our house when my sister appeared hand in hand with another girl I’d never seen before.

“She’s our new neighbor!” My sister said, fighting to hold back her excitement as she always had. I didn’t remember seeing anyone with a moving truck anywhere near our house, but I didn’t want to be rude, so I introduced myself with a smile. The new girl was shy but suggested we play hide and seek when I asked what we should do.

“You should be the first to count!” I said. “It’s only fair, you’re new.”

The girl covered her eyes and I ran off to hide in my favorite spot, a thick bush next to our back porch. I watched as my sister scampered off behind a tree and stood, giggling so loudly that she gave away her position almost immediately. We played like that for about an hour, with my sister and the new girl swapping between hider and seeker since neither of them could find me.

“It’s your turn now!” My sister said to me after a while.

“You guys haven’t even found me once!” I said.

“Yeah, but it’s not fair, we both want to hide together!” The new girl said.

“Okay, fine,” I said, immediately closing my eyes and starting to count as loudly as I could. I remember feeling incredibly confident, knowing that I’d be able to find them in seconds. So I counted to sixty instead of thirty just to give them a better head start.

When I opened my eyes, they were gone.

“Ready or not, here I come!” I yelled. I ran over to a big willow with a little opening that I knew was my sister’s favorite place to hide. But she wasn’t behind the willow, and she wasn’t behind any of her usual spots either. I kept searching and searching and I couldn’t find either of them anywhere.

And suddenly I was feeling incredibly nervous as I searched, becoming increasingly desperate as every tree I looked behind, and every bush I searched inside came up empty. So I started yelling their names.

“Guys, where are you? This isn’t funny anymore!” I yelled over and over as I walked.

And finally, I found them. They weren’t hiding when I did, they were standing and laughing happily, distracted, in the middle of a clearing.

They weren’t alone.

A man was with them. Or at least I think it was a man. He was dressed in a top hat and three-piece suit. It was both elegant and playful in the most sinister way. I wish I knew how else to describe him, how else he looked like, but I couldn’t see his face. It was almost like he didn’t have one, like the top hat was somehow always covering his eyes in just the right way that it masked him completely except for an awful, unnatural smile.

“Come here listen!” My sister said when she finally noticed me.

“Oh, uhm… no, I think we should go home,” I started saying.

But then the man spoke. It was a happy, whimsical voice, both whispery and loud at the same time, both hugely inviting and massively threatening.

“No, stay! I’m teaching your sister the Tree Trunk Game!”

I took a step back. How did this man know she was my sister? I looked over at her and shook my head. But she just rolled her eyes and ignored me.

“I think dinner will probably be ready. Mom’s gonna be mad if we’re late,” I said almost desperately, hoping my sister would take a hint. But she only turned around to look at me, hands held together almost as if she was praying, and said:

“No, no! Just look at this super quick!”

“Yeah, watch this it's awesome!” Said the new girl.

And then the man spoke again.

“It’s simple! You find two trees like these,” he said, and he hopped over to a pair of gnarled trees that were rooted so closely together they might have almost been the same plant and formed a sort of V shape.

“And then you hip, and you hop from one side to the other,” he said leaning playfully against the tree. “And you say the words!”

“What words?” I asked, but the man had started jumping between the V, moving from one side to the other, and reciting what sounded like a poem.

“It’s time to play the tree trunk game, and though I’ll never be the same. I will not stop for all my luck, until I find I’ve gotten stuck.”

And one the final word, the man jumped one last time and promptly disappeared as if he’d gone through a door between the two trees.

I ran forward immediately, searching everywhere for the man. I looked through the trees. I even cautiously stuck my hand between them, but nothing happened.

“He’ll be back, watch!” Said my sister as she laughed.

“Here I am!” yelled the man from behind us. I turned around, terrified, and looked at the man wide-eyed. He smiled at me, then looked at my sister.

“Now you try!” He said.

“No!” I screamed, and immediately ran over to her and grabbed her arm. I could feel her fighting against me, I could feel her protesting, but I didn’t care. Whatever was happening was not normal. I looked around, searching for a way to get out.

“My mom will be worried. Dinner,” I said, then looked at the new girl. “You should come too.”

“I’m going to play the Tree Trunk Game,” she said.

“Stay and watch!” said the man “It’s fun!”

“No,” I said, and I pulled my sister’s arm hard and back towards our house. I walked away as fast as I could, getting as much distance between us and the clearing as I could. In a panic, I managed to just barely hear as the new girl recited the words herself.

“It’s time to play the Tree Trunk Game, and though I’ll never be the same, I will not stop for all my luck, until I find I’ve gotten stuck!”

My sister was clawing at my arm, and I finally let go when we could see our house behind some trees.

“Why would you do that?” She said, angry. “Now I’ll never get to play!”

“Because,” I said. “Don’t you remember you’re not supposed to talk to strangers? That guy was scary!”

“He wasn’t a stranger!”

“What?”

“Yeah! They’re brothers!”

I blinked, then shook my head, grabbed my sister’s shoulders, and held her tight.

“Listen,” I said. “I need you to promise me to never, ever, play that game. I don’t care if you think it’s fun.”

My sister sighed, “fine.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

I nodded, and we walked back into the house and got ready for dinner.

I don’t really know why I never mentioned the game to my parents that night. I guess I was naïve, or maybe I trusted that my sister would be sensible enough to listen to my warning. We ate dinner and didn’t say a word about the man in the hat or the game. My sister didn’t even mention the new neighbor girl. Then we sat around watching a little bit of TV before going upstairs.

Back then, my sister and I shared a room because my parent’s had been painting hers and doing some renovations on the house. They’d stuck a small bed next to mine where she slept. My room was small, but it had always been my favorite because it had huge windows that let you see all the stars and the woods around our house.

She wasn’t in her bed when I woke up that night. I can’t tell you how I knew, but I knew something was wrong almost immediately. Her shoes were gone, and the door to our room was wide open. I instantly jumped up, threw my shoes on, and looked out our window where I just barely managed to see below as her tiny figure disappeared into the shadows of the woods.

I didn’t think, I was too terrified. I ran down the stairs as fast as I could, doing my best not to wake my parents, managed to get out of the house into the cold night air, and ran after her between the trees. I could hear her in the distance, she was giggling, talking to someone excitedly. And then she started to say the words.

“It’s time to play the Tree Trunk Game, and though I’ll never be the same…”

“No!” I yelled as I ran through bushes and between trees. “Stop!”

“I will not stop for all my luck.”

I burst through the trees into the clearing just in time to see my sister and the man jumping between the trees.

“Until I find I’ve gotten stuck!”

And on that last word, the man looked up and I saw his eyes were a deep, unnatural yellow, and my sister saw me and gave me a giant smile and a half wave as she jumped through the tree and disappeared on the other side.

The sound is coming from the closet behind the ship’s engine room. A thud that echoes into a high-pitched metallic whine so acute you can feel it bouncing hard into your spine.

Plunk, it goes.

Then again, plunk.

A steady rhythm. I walk towards it slowly. Sweat itches the tip of my nose and I wipe hard with a moist sleeve.

Plunk as the ship creaks around me, a moaning that protests against the heat, the sound of something waking. The closet door is open, hinges stuck from humidity keep it still.

Plunk as I get closer.

Plunk

I turn the corner and look inside. The room is dark, a sharp triangle of light from the doorway cuts diagonally through the shadows.

Plunk. Daniel sits in the corner, his face and right side lit. He looks bored, eyes almost dead as he stares at the dark wall to his left. I can see the acne on his cheeks from the doorway. He moves.

Plunk. More acne appears, splashes. My pupils dilate, open themselves to the dark on the floor. Daniel’s holding something, a club of some sort. Acne doesn’t splash. I look down.

Plunk.

Blood.

Plunk.

A pool of blood crawling towards me. I look up again as Daniel moves.

Plunk.

His leg. Cut clean through at the knee somehow.

Plunk.

This time I see the end of his tibia hit steel wall. The sound reverberates, accompanied by a squelching. I look back down at the stump that was his leg.

Plunk as an artery pushes out blood. Rhythm. I take a step back.

“What the fuck,” I whisper. Daniel looks up. He smiles. A final, harder plunk. He stares at me, eyes dead as he starts laughing. From his mouth a high-pitched crazed laugh that gets louder and louder until it turns into a single lung-cracking scream.

Have ye ever heard of the doldrums? The windless dead, heat and salt stuck to yer skin so deep ye want naught but to claw it off. Nothing t’do. Boredom comes, and the water goes quick. Gone soon, the food as well. Drink’s what little left. Drink to keep the sailors calm. Drink to keep away th’insanity. Waiting. All’s we can do is wait. Wait and pray the devils let us go. Bring back the wind, they will. But when? Aye, that the question be. When. One week? Two? A month at sea unmoving’s ‘nough to get to ye. Enough to take a man and make him violent. More to fear than just a sailor’s dying mind, in that windless desert there be. Twixt windless still water the veil lifts and Hell itself comes to ye. That be the thing to fear. That be what stops a sailor’s bar, raucous with drink, dead silent at the mention of the doldrums.

— HN Whitman

My great grandfather’s words, written nearly one hundred years before that fourth voyage of mine aboard the Penguin’s Delight, were on my mind as I watched the Washington coastline fade to blue. Next to me, the Penguin’s cook, a bear of a man with sleeves colored with various tattoos named Pete, leaned against the rail and breathed in the sea spray.

“Will you look at that,” he said, nodding at a large brown bird floating in the wind above us. “Captain’s gonna love that.”

“Albatross?”

“See if he follows. Good luck if he does for a couple hours.”

I nodded and looked up at the discolored white and light blue paint of the cockpit, a long streak of dark red rust had already set in, flowing down from its steel roof as it did in so many of the ship’s nooks. Barely even ten years old at this point, and already showing more battle scars than any other fishing vessel out there, the Penguin’s Delight. Her captain had come out of the cockpit and was standing with the door open behind him, eyes fixed on the albatross above us. He stood in silence, wearing an old yellow fishing coat and a dark red knit beanie, both of which he claimed were lucky. On his shoulder, his black cat, Pearl, using his long beard and hair almost as camouflage, watched me with green eyes.

I’d been fishing for over five years by then and had yet to meet a more superstitious crew. Our last trip had been called short when the engineer and first mate, Oli Penn, had very nearly thrown one of the deckhands, a kid named Will, overboard. It’d been a quiet night, with everyone asleep except for me and this kid. We’d been working on deck, sweeping up some fish guts from our past haul, when the kid had started whistling. Next thing I know, Oli had burst out of his quarters with a bottle of rum in hand and screaming that Will was going to get us all killed. Before I even knew what was happening, he’d narrowly missed the kid’s head with the bottle and had him held over the railing, screaming at him to never whistle again.

“Lore says it takes the wind out the sails,” Pete had told me after we’d managed to wrestle the shocked deckhand back to safety and away from Oli. “But more than that, it wakes the sea, makes her angry.”

“Bit of an overreaction, though, right?” I’d say, thinking about how drunk Oli had been.

But Pete had just shook his head. “We don’t want a storm on us, do we?” Had been all he’d said. Isaac had immediately turned us back home, saying just about the same thing. Poor Will was gagged with an old rag until we made port, and I never saw him again.

That wasn’t the only strange thing I’d ever hear Captain Porter, Oli, or even Pete insist on. Bananas were strictly prohibited, as was saying goodbye to anyone once we were standing on the ship. And while I’d been terrified of finding myself in the same position as Will, I realized quickly that I’d be safe from their wrath as long as I followed the rules. Besides, as far as I could tell, this ship was the best paying vessel anywhere, and that was all that really mattered. Some sailors and fishermen might go on poetic rants about freedom and adventure, but the truth is that anyone that isn’t kidding themselves knows that there are really only two reasons you’d ever subject yourself to a life like this: insanity, or money, and there was a lot of insanity going around the Penguin.

The albatross banked left, suddenly turning away from us. Captain Porter, who’d been watching the animal the entire time, frowned, and walked back into the cockpit, slamming the door behind him. Three months at sea, my longest voyage ever. Three months and I’d just spent the better part of the last four hours loading supplies into the ship with Pete and his son, Daniel. Enough for seven months at least, more than double the time we’d be out there in theory. More time than my wife would be pregnant.

“What’s on your mind, Franky?” Asked Pete.

I shook my head.

“Doldrums,” I said. Pete nodded.

“The captain speak to you about it?”

He had and he hadn’t. A few weeks before we’d left port, Isaac had walked up to me while drunk at a bar. He’d gone on an extremely long, barely coherent talk about the dangers of the trip. He’d gone on and on about the doldrums, about getting stuck, about spending months in waters that didn’t move. He’d asked at the end if I was willing to bet my sanity for some extra cash and I’d agreed. But doldrums? I’d read about how they worked before, how the differences in temperature between the water, the surface, and the air above would sometimes cause wind to go straight up. It had been a problem for sailboats for hundreds of years.

“I don’t understand,” I told Pete. “We have an engine.”

Pete shook his head and shrugged.

“No wind, no waves, no currents, no sound,” he said. “That’s not the problem, you see? That’s a symptom.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you get sick and you feel bad. Body aches, throat gets sore. That’s not what’s wrong with you. What’s wrong is you got a virus inside you that’s taken a hold of you.”

I nodded.

“Same thing for the doldrums, lad. The wind was just what they needed to take away to get ships stuck. No wind is a symptom, not a problem.”

“They?”

“Yes, and you best hope we don’t get stuck too.”

My boat is my cell. There is something to be said about the cold, lifeless claustrophobia that grips the heart of those who find themselves standing on a few planks of wood and steel. Out there in the open blue of the world, horizon keeps the keys. Out there, out there where there is nothing but salt and wet and faces that grow far too familiar, the lines between freedom and imprisonment are blurred. Some find out too late that they can’t handle the emptiness, the loneliness that holds them during those nights when the sky is full of stars. It’s that tedium in the void that drives us to insanity. Nothing to do for hours on end except chug along over waves and waves, a repetition of movement that becomes mind numbingly boring.

For two weeks it was all the same. The Penguin’s Delight bobbed up and down, fighting its way south at a steady pace while her five occupants swapped stories and drank. No fishing until we reached the albacore in the South Pacific, was what Captain Isaac had said, and so we sat around playing cards and listening to Pete talk.

“What’s the deal with the gulls?” I’d asked one night after we’d all had our dinner. We were sitting around the small table where we usually ate. Oli, whitening stubble over a strong chin, had been noodling on his mandolin when he’d stopped at my question and looked over at Isaac, who’d been sitting off to the side on a chair, watching the sea out of one of the windows.

“You want to take this one, Captain?” Oli said. “Teach ol’ Franky boy here a little something?”

But Isaac only smirked. A small meow from Pearl had gotten his attention as the cat jumped up on his lap and took from him a small piece of fish he’d saved from dinner. Oli shook his head looking disgusted.

“Don’t know how you people do it,” he said.

“What, eat fish?” I asked. Oli laughed and nodded.

“But you’re a fisherman,” said Daniel from the sink where he was washing the night’s dishes.

“You don’t shit where you eat,” said Oli, and with that he stood, sang a verse from some song I’d never heard about a girl that had been left back home and walked out of the room laughing. I looked over at Daniel who was still shaking his head.

“A fisherman that doesn’t like fish. I don’t get it,” he said under his breath.

“No one does, not with Oli,” said Pete. “Captain and I have been sailing with the guy for over a decade and we still don’t.”

“Strange fellow, he is,” said Captain Porter. “And they’re the souls of those that died at sea, Frank.”

“Seagulls?” I asked.

“Aye.”

“Wasn’t that the albatross?”

Captain Isaac shook his head and scratched at Pearl’s ears. Pete took over for him.

“Daniel, you know the answer to that one, don’t you? I think I’ve told you more than once before.”

“It’s both,” Daniel said. He finished drying a final plate with a cloth and walked over to us. “But I don’t know too many stories.”

“Aye, the kid’s not listened to me enough. Shouldn’t be here if you ask me,” said Pete. “But there was no convincing him otherwise.”

Daniel, who was just as tall as Pete but much skinnier, shook his head. He said nothing else, letting his father continue speaking.

“You ever been down to Point Nemo?” Pete asked me. I shook my head. This would be the first time I’d ever crossed the equator, and Point Nemo was far into the South Pacific.

“Know what it is, though?”

I nodded. The most remote point on Earth, farthest you could get from land in any direction, something like 1600 miles to the closest island, I thought.

“Captain, Oli and I have been there more than a few times, haven’t we Cap?” said Pete.

“A fair share for us all, yes,” said the captain.

“There’s nothing there, you know,” Pete continued. “Nothing but water. No fish. No life. Nothing but the deep. We’ve all heard that something’s down there, but what? That no one knows.”

“Kraken,” said Daniel, half laughing. Pete looked at him with a serious expression.

“Boy, I’ve taught you better than to be trifling with this sort of shit.”

“Right, look. Here be monsters, no?” Said Daniel as he turned to look at me. “This is all just old-world superstitions. So much of this stuff has serious rational explanations, you know? It’s not all monsters and luck.”

Pete sighed. Isaac watched Daniel from the window, an eyebrow raised.

“That thinking will change,” he said. “No need for believing when you see what can’t be explained with your own eyes.”

“But it should have an explanation, shouldn’t it?” said Daniel again. “Or at least, I think it should.”

Pete nodded and spoke, “that’s why I brought about Point Nemo. You think of me as someone that believes in the old sea tales, you think of Isaac and Oli as crazy men who believe in old superstitions, but that’s not what we are. We don’t know what the things we’ve seen mean. We know what our predecessors have given as theories. The seagull is the soul of a man that’s died at sea, that’s what we’ve been told for years. It doesn’t make sense to equate one with the other, that much I agree with you, but when you’re in the middle of nowhere, when you find yourself in Point Nemo, thousands of miles away from land in all directions, and suddenly a gull flies over you, what then?”

“You saw a gull at Point Nemo and never told me about it?” asked Daniel.

“More than once,” said Captain Isaac nodding.

“How far can a gull fly?” Asked Pete. Daniel shrugged. “Not more than sixteen hundred miles, I’ll tell you that. Not without a break, not without food, not without water.”

“So what was it doing out there?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” said Pete. “But the last time we saw one so far out it coincided with a horrible shipping accident that lost five men to the sea. Five men, five gulls we saw that day.”

“What does one have to do with the other?” Asked Daniel.

“They came from that direction,” said Isaac. “Mayday came in on the radio. A few hours later we saw the gulls flying from there. Five of them side by side.”

“The souls of men that died at sea,” I said to myself. Both Pete and Isaac nodded.

“What other explanation than the one that’s always been said?” Asked Pete.

“Coincidence?” Asked Daniel.

“Maybe,” said Pete. “But out here, out here there’s not a lot of room for coincidences.”

Daniel and I were on the Penguin’s stern. The engine vibrated underneath our feet, the propeller creating a long line of white foam that stretched off into the distance. It was sunny, a huge forest of white puffy clouds to our right hung over the horizon. The cold of the northern Pacific had gradually gone, turning to a hot and almost unbearably humid air that somehow made everything feel sticky.

“He wasn’t particularly happy that I came along,” Daniel was saying about his father, Pete.

“I mean I’m sure the guy had his reasons.”

Daniel nodded. “For sure, I mean I get it. It’s dangerous work. We all know it.”

“So why do it if you don’t have to?”

Daniel shrugged and leaned his back on the railing. “I don’t know. Probably because it’s exactly what he didn’t want.”

“Right, so teenage rebellion?”

“Not exactly, I mean I couldn’t see myself working in an office, is all.”

“There’s other jobs out there that aren’t life threatening and aren’t in an office.”

Daniel laughed, then said, “yeah, but none of those were staring me in the face.”

I laughed too. Daniel and Pete had spent the entire trip arguing with each other. Pete still insisting that his son shouldn’t have come, angry at times with the captain for letting him, even angry at me every so often as an extension of Daniel himself. It had all gotten worse with the rising temperature. The closer we got to the equator, the closer we got to the doldrums, the more tense and nervous the atmosphere aboard the Penguin’s Delight had become.

“He thinks its his fault you’re here,” I said.

“I know that too. Been trying to convince him, but you know what he’s like. It’s like everyone here and their seagulls. Once they have an idea in their heads, there’s nothing to do about it,” said Daniel. He reached into his pockets, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. He inhaled deeply before he kept speaking.

“I don’t know, man. You hear some of the shit Oli says sometimes when he’s especially drunk?”

I nodded. Some of Oli’s stories were hard to believe, and in a sense even more so now that we hadn’t seen anything particularly supernatural so far. Still, I couldn’t help but feel some amount of nervousness about these waters, and I didn’t really feel like speaking about it very much. So I left Daniel alone on the back of the boat and went in search of the captain. Maybe he’d have a few words for me that might calm my nerves.

I walked up the stairs and into the cockpit. Captain Porter, beard longer than ever, black curly hair flowing everywhere, was standing shirtless at the wheel. Pearl, who was lying on top of the console, announced my arrival with a quick little meow and the captain nodded at me as I walked in.

“How are ya, Mister Whitman?” He asked.

“Good, I guess,” I said.

The captain smirked and shook his head. “Nervous, too, I’m guessing?”

“How can you tell?”

“We’ve been sailing for near three weeks and it’s not until now that you come up here.”

I supposed he was right. I hadn’t had a reason to come up here the entire time.

“My grandfather was a sailor too. He had a journal where he wrote about the doldrums,” I said. Isaac nodded but said nothing else. I looked ahead, watched the Penguin’s prow bob up and down with the waves.

“He didn’t say anything particularly nice about it.”

“Well you’re right on time. You see out there?” Asked the captain.

“Where?”

“Ahead of us. See how there’s movement? Currents?”

“I do.”

“You see right after that? Completely still.”

I squinted hard. Far off in the distance, the ocean suddenly went still. So still that you could see clouds reflected on its surface.

“Is that it?” I asked.

But again, the captain didn’t say anything. His face was serious but calm, completely glued to the still water ahead.

“Can’t we go around?” I asked. But the captain only shook his head. He reached over the wheel and patted Pearl’s head seven times, then put his hand on the ship’s throttle and slowly inched it forward. From behind us I heard the engine roar louder, and then a sudden static from the radio as Oli, no doubt in the engine room, called in to confirm what was going on. Isaac grabbed the radio.

“Let her purr, we’re in the thick of it now,” he said. I watched Pete suddenly come out of the kitchen below us and run forward. He stood on the bow, looking in the same direction we all were, watching as we came closer and closer to the stillness. I watched Pete kneel, a rosary in hand as he prayed.

“Bloody lot that will do,” said Isaac. I looked at him and he shrugged. “No god anywhere is going to help us out of this one.”

As if on cue, I watched Oli rush towards the front of the boat, laughing wildly. He stood up high on the bow’s railing waving maniacally at the incoming doldrums.

“He’s insane!” I yelled. Captain Porter smiled and nodded as Oli turned, ran hard at Pete, swiped the rosary from his hands and threw it as hard as he could overboard. Pete shook his head, resigned as Oli danced back to the front of the boat. I could barely hear his whoops and hollers over the sound of the engine and the wind, but I knew they were there.

“Sometimes I think it’s his complete disregard for his life that keeps us all safe,” said the captain as he watched more of Oli’s antics. “Here we go.”

Captain Isaac took in a long breath as the ship blew past the final wave. The ship’s rising and falling stopped immediately, replaced by a perfectly smooth ride. I stepped out of the cockpit to feel the wind in my hair and get a better look around. There was nothing but still water ahead of us, its surface so completely motionless it was like we were on the surface of an enormous mirror. I looked behind us, searching for the mirror’s edge, that place where we’d broken through the waves. To my horror I saw nothing. The waves the Penguin had been cutting through only seconds ago were gone, replaced by a completely smooth surface. I looked back into the cockpit.

“The waves behind us!” I yelled. “They’re gone!”

“Aye, they’re not going to let us through this time,” he said. I was about to ask him what exactly that meant when the engine suddenly cut off. There hadn’t been any warning. The thing hadn’t even tried to stay on, one second it was loud as can be, and the next there was nothing but the sound of water splashing off the hull. Captain Isaac exhaled, gave Pearl a couple of pats on the head, then looked me in the eye.

“Welcome to the doldrums,” he said.

Nothing. That was all there was for the first two weeks. We were floating, suspended and unmoving in water so still it felt as though we were being held in some impossible space between the surface and the air. Beyond the ship, the water mirrored the sky above so perfectly there was no horizon, nothing to distinguish water from air except the tiny ripples the Penguin’s Delight would occasionally make as it shifted with our movement. There was nothing to look at around us, not a cloud during the day, or stars and moon at night. I learned very quickly not to look past the ship’s railing, it was the only thing that I could do to keep away the overwhelming feeling of smallness, of insignificance that would immediately take a hold of you whenever you looked out into the nothingness.

But there was more nothingness to be found inside the ship. What little we had to entertain ourselves, cards and booze, books and games, quickly lost their interest. Pete’s stories became repetitive. There was nothing to say. Nothing happening. Nothing. Soon the ship was quiet, a maddening silence that burned in your ears. Quiet except for the occasional shift of wood and metal, and the clinking of emptying bottles of rum.

Then on the thirteenth night, the whispers came.

Every day we had gathered in the cockpit, right as the sun fell into the sea, to watch the captain try to turn the engine on. This night, just like every other, there wasn’t ever a stutter, a single sound anywhere that might indicate that our boat was trying to turn itself on. I looked over at Daniel who was suddenly acting strange. He was shaking his head, opening and clothing his mouth.

“No,” he said, then again. “No.”

Everyone else turned to look at him, resigned.

“There has to be something.”

Pete raised a hand, placing it gently on his son’s shoulder. Daniel shook him off, hard.

“How is any of this even fucking possible? Why the fuck haven’t we even radioed for help?”

“No use trying,” said Captain Porter.

“Bullshit.”

“Here,” said the captain. He stepped aside and let Daniel stand in front of the console. We watched him fumble over the knobs and buttons, desperation growing as he turned every switch, and began slamming every button in front of him with a fist. I expected the captain to stop him, but he stood still, watching.

“Daniel,” said Pete. “You need a drink.”

“I don’t want a fucking drink, I want to fucking move!” He said.

Oli smirked and shook his head. He was about to say something, but the second he made a move Daniel was on him.

“This is all your fucking fault!” He shouted as he let his fist fly. Pete managed to jump in front of his son immediately, grabbing him by the shoulders and pulling him back as Daniel screamed.

“He’s the fucking engineer! Why the fuck isn’t the engine working, you fucking asshole!” He continued as Pete moved him towards the door. Daniel grabbed at the door’s frame, trying hard to pull himself back inside the cockpit.

“I’ll fucking kill you, you piece of shit!” He said, keeping himself steady as he channeled his rage, flinging insult after insult at Oli. But Oli was leaning on the console, laughing. Nothing Daniel had said had seemingly affected him. Then he suddenly stood upright, moving his head wildly around in search of something. I blinked, confused, realizing that Daniel had stopped his insults and was now leaning against his father, unmoving.

It came suddenly. A low hissing breath right behind my ear that sent chills thundering down my spine. I turned immediately, but there was nothing but the wall of the cockpit behind me. I looked over at Captain Isaac who was standing on edge.

It suddenly dawned on me that I had never seen this man show any sign of terror, not when we’d left, not on any of our previous voyages, not when Oli had nearly drowned Will, not when the albatross had disappeared when we’d left port, not even when we’d finally gotten stuck in the doldrums. He’d been completely calm the entire time, had made this entire experience seem like just a minor inconvenience to him. But now? Now I could see actual fear in his eyes. I could see them almost shaking, tearing up even as he blinked a couple of times in quick succession. And suddenly his terror was taking hold of me. Whatever this thing was, whatever had just whispered in my ear, it was something that had very nearly sent a man I thought was unphased by everything, into a panic.

I thought back to my grandfather’s words for the first time in months. The veil lifts and hell itself comes, he’d written. Pete himself had even mentioned something evil holding us here. Was this it?

The whispers continued. They circled us, surrounded us, played with us. I realized I couldn’t understand them at all. I could hear my mind screaming only one thing at me, run. And so before I could even understand what the hell I was doing, I was pushing past Pete and Daniel, right into the warm humid air of the doldrums.

The whispers followed me. They kept on me until I reached the back of the boat, almost like if they were holding on to me. Nothing helped. Nothing made them go away. Sticking my fingers in my ears changed nothing. I could still hear them, still feel a humid breath as it crawled deep inside my ear and stayed there. I lay on my side, closed my eyes, and screamed, trying as hard as I could to make the sound go away.

I screamed until my throat was sore, maybe even bleeding, and only stopped because Oli appeared in front of me and grabbed my arm. He pulled me up to my feet hard and suddenly screamed as loudly as he could in my face. I blinked and I felt his hand as it slapped me hard.

“You’re alright, they’ll be gone soon,” he said.

“I, what, how do, wh-” I said as he slapped me again. I exhaled, trying my best to ignore the whispers around us. That’s when I noticed that Oli was bleeding.

“What happened?” I asked, pointing at a cut on his shoulder, right over his clavicle.

“Daniel came at me with a knife. Managed to wrestle him off. He ran away.”

“Daniel did that?”

“He ain’t himself. We had to lock him up in a closet next to the engine room.”

I nodded. “Is he okay?”

Oli shrugged.

We gotta find him.”

“Where’d he go?” I asked. Oli rolled his eyes and shook his head. I nodded. It was a dumb question. I followed Oli back to the cockpit where Captain Isaac was standing, frantically speaking into the radio.

“Oli’s got him,” he said he looked at me. “We thought Daniel might have gotten to you.”

“Gotten to me?” I asked. Captain Isaac nodded.

“Doldrum sickness.” The captain said. “We need to find him before something bad happens. Pete said he was going to go look for Daniel in the freezers. You two go check the engine room.”

The sound of Daniel’s hysterical laughing was accompanied by more plunks as he resumed smashing his own leg into the wall. I turned away as I felt the sudden and familiar acid taste that comes right before you puke. Legs shaking, I just barely managed to get out of the closet before I fell to my knees and vomited rum and bile all over the hall outside the engine room.

“Where’s the knife?” I could hear Oli saying from behind me. He’d walked in after me and was looking everywhere for the weapon Daniel had used on him, and presumably, to cut his own leg off.

I looked up at Oli. He was looking around so calmly it reminded me of Captain Isaac’s words from just a few weeks ago. That Oli was absolutely insane, seemingly undisturbed by any of what he was seeing, might really turn out to be a good thing. He turned and looked at me, asked about the knife and I looked around the floor, forgetting I wasn’t even inside the room with Daniel. There was nothing, of course, just a small pool of my puke against the wall. No blood anywhere. Daniel had gotten to work inside the closet.

Oli repeated his question once again as he inched in closer to the door.

“Danny boy?” He said. “I’m coming in, alright?”

Daniel’s laughter immediately stopped. For a moment it was quiet. Oli stepped into the shadows slowly. Then screams. Screams from Daniel, silence from Oli. I could hear the whispers again, getting louder, deeper, in my ears. I watched the shadows inside the closet moving. Then Oli’s voice from inside screamed for me to find Pete.

I stood up immediately and ran. Up the stairs, out into the open air, darkness suddenly holding me as the whispers followed. They sounded different now, slower, almost seductive. I stopped and looked out far past the railing, far into the black. Something in the distance grabbed my attention. Out there over the water, a faint light. It was just a small glimmer, nothing more. Was it getting closer? Had the captain somehow managed to call for help during all of this? I squinted hard. It was impossible to get a better look, but it seemed to be pulsing, almost like a beating heart of some sorts or a very distant star. Only it was clearly bigger, and clearly closer. Had it gotten closer? It seemed to have. It seemed to have been moving towards me, and then suddenly away from me for some reason. I blinked. Looked hard again at the little light and reached my hand out to investigate.

“Frank!”

A hard pull from behind and I was on the floor. It was quiet again. The whispers had been so loud only seconds ago, and… I blinked again and looked around. I was lying next to the railing, the door I’d come out of some fifteen feet away. How the hell had I gotten all the way over here? I couldn’t remember moving my feet. Pete stood up. He extended a hand, and I took it.

“What the hell were you doing?” He asked.

I looked out again at the void of the doldrums for only a second. The light I thought I’d seen was gone. I shook my head and breathed.

“I don’t know,” I said. I remembered Daniel and Oli and immediately told Pete who took off in the engine room’s direction. I followed closely behind.

When we finally reached Oli, he was leaning against the wall and covered in blood. The second he saw Pete he stood up and ran straight towards him, grabbing him hard and screaming at me to pull him out of the engine room. Tears fell down my eyes as I heard Pete screaming in agony and rage, an immediate understanding of what had happened falling on his shoulders.

We dragged Pete kicking and screaming back to his room. Oli managed to get him on the bed before he pulled me out of there and closed the door behind me, but not before I saw Pete, tears in his eyes, rocking back and forth in desperate grief.

“What the fuck happened?” I asked.

“Fucker tried to stab himself in the neck,” said Oli. “Well, no, I wouldn’t say try.”

Then he grabbed me again and motioned for me to follow. I stood still, nodding my head towards Pete’s door. For a moment I could see a hint of frustration in Oli’s eyes, but he nodded. He pulled out a radio from his pocket and told the captain what had happened. When Isaac said he was on his way down, Oli motioned for me to follow him.

“You need to see something,” he said. Slowly, I followed him down to the engine room, past my vomit, and into the closet. Oli flipped a switch and light flooded the little room. It was almost entirely covered in blood, the floor a massive puddle of red, the walls splashed up to the ceiling. I covered my mouth for a second and exhaled.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s got nothing to do with it,” said Oli. “Notice anything missing?”

And I blinked again. Daniel’s body was gone, a clear path of blood lead out of the room and back up the stairs towards the deck. Only the knife was visible on the floor.

“Wasn’t he…”

“Dead?” Oli finished for me. I nodded. Oli continued speaking.

“He was. It doesn’t matter. If the whispers come, they take someone. Some way, somehow, they always take someone. You understand?” He asked.

I nodded.

“We didn’t lock him up in here with a knife,” said Oli as he picked up the blade and wiped it clean. “We’re not fucking stupid.”

“So how did he get it?” I asked. But Oli just cocked his head and walked out of the engine room, back towards Pete’s room. And in the distance, past Pete’s desperate mourning wails, I heard the faint sound of a splash in the water, as if something had jumped overboard.

It’s kind of hard to know where to really start. I suppose all of this, more than anything, has to do with my twin brother, Peter. Peter lives in DC and I hadn’t spoken to him in a really long time, so I was a little bit shocked to find him knocking on my door three nights ago in the middle of the night.

“Pete?”

“Took you long enough to answer,” he said.

“What are you even doing here?” I asked as he pushed past me into my cramped New York apartment. “It’s four in the morning, dude, I was sleeping.”

He sat down on my couch and looked around the room, “it’s smaller than it looked in the pictures.”

“You’ve seen pictures?”

“Mom sent me some.”

I nodded. Of course Mom had sent him photos. She still couldn’t get over the fact that we didn’t really talk anymore. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, I think brothers, even identical twins, can drift apart once life gets in the way. Pete had gone to work for some big tech firm, loved to brag about all the NDAs he’d had to sign, and I had moved to New York and sold my soul to the finance world.

“You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

Pete smiled. “I’m part of an ongoing investigation. Testing some stuff I’m not exactly allowed to talk about.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Of course. And you couldn’t get a hotel?”

Pete frowned, rubbed his eyes, and shook his head. “I’m… I guess I’m in a smidge of trouble.”

“A smidge?”

“I can’t use a credit card, and I lost all my cash on the way here.”

“What?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Can’t use an ATM?”

“They’ll track that,” Pete said. He glanced out the window. His face was like looking in a mirror. We looked so similar even I had trouble telling us apart whenever I looked at old pictures of us. But he looked nervous.

“I’m sorry, someone is tracking you? What the fuck did you get yourself into?”

“Look it’s not a big deal,” he said.

“Oh yeah, doesn’t seem like it.”

“It’s not,” Pete stood up. He walked over to me and grabbed me by the shoulders gently. “It’s just a bit of corporate espionage, is all. We have competitors, and my boss is paranoid. He doesn’t want me using a credit card or anything, so they don’t know I’m here.”

“You really expect me to buy that?”

“I expect you to let me stay here for a night. I’ll be gone in the morning.”

I sighed.

“You’re sure you’re not in real trouble?” I asked. Pete smiled.

“I am in trouble,” he said. “But just a smidge of it.”

“How’d you lose the cash?”

“Long story. Look, just go to bed. Relax. I’m just here to check on some things.”

“You have to give me something better than that. No way you actually think what you’re saying is going to calm me down.”

“Alright, look, all I can say is the company I work for has some IP at North Brother. I’m just going to go tomorrow to make sure it’s all running smoothly.”

“North Brother?”

Pete nodded. He walked over to my kitchen and started opening cabinets. North Brother sounded familiar somehow, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Not a neighborhood as far as I could remember. Then it clicked.

“Wait isn’t that the island?” I said. Pete nodded as he poured some water into a glass he’d found.

“What the hell is even there?”

Pete turned and laughed. He still seemed nervous.

“Nothing,” he said. “Not that I could say either way, but the people I work with are thinking about buying the land and I’m going to go check it out.”

I nodded slowly. None of what Pete was saying made much sense, but I supposed it was better than receiving zero explanation. As long as he wasn’t in some serious trouble, I guessed I could live with him being intentionally vague.

“Fine,” I said, finally. “I’ll go to bed. See you tomorrow.”

“I’ll be gone by the time you’re up,” he said. “Just need a couple hours rest, that’s all.”

He paused for a moment, then spoke again.

“I have to leave this phone here too,” he said pulling an old iPhone from his pocket. “No electronics allowed on the island for security reasons. I’ll get it back in a few days. Cool?”

“Sure,” I said as I walked into the bedroom. “Do whatever you need.” 

——————

Pete was gone when I woke up the next day, no sign of him having even been there the night before. For a second, I thought maybe it had all been a dream. But right as I was about to call him to figure out if it was, his phone, which he’d left on the coffee table, caught my attention.

It seemed like an old iPhone, one of the ones with the little button near the bottom, completely black, and a slightly scratched screen, only this one didn’t have an Apple logo in the back. I frowned, trying to remember if I’d ever heard of Apple removing logos from their phones, and put it back where I found it. That’s when the screen lit up and a notification popped up. It was from an app I didn’t recognize, a completely black square as the logo in the banner and little else. What it said, though, was strange.

“UPP in vicinity. Proceed with caution.”

“The hell is a UPP?” I said to myself. It wasn’t a term I recognized, so I pulled my own phone out and did a quick google search. Nothing particularly interesting came up, something about how much you might contribute towards a pension, a universal phone processor, even ultimate ping pong. Nothing that would make anyone really need to “proceed with caution.”

I thought about my brother, about all the things he said the night before. Everything had seemed so sketchy. He’d looked nervous, more nervous than I’d ever really seen him. There was no doubt in my mind about the fact that he’d been lying to me, but what was he actually up to? Even stranger, why leave his phone here. Did he know I’d look at it or just blindly trust I’d leave it alone on the coffee table? And then there was that island. As far as I could remember there was no way to get there anymore, not legally at least. Following him wouldn’t really be an option, but I could just try and get into his phone, check to see if there was any information I might have missed.

Fuck it, I thought as I tapped on the notification banner and slid my finger to the right. Old phone, but it did somehow have face recognition, and as smart as my brother was, he always forgot that we pretty much had the same face. Pretty convenient.

The app interface was nothing special, just a camera app but without a shutter button anywhere. I tried using the volume controls to take a photo like with a regular iPhone, but nothing happened. There was little else except a small menu bar at the top of the screen. When I clicked it, a password wall came up. Fifteen characters. How the hell was I supposed to guess a fifteen minimum character password? Assuming letters, numbers, and probably one or two symbols, it’d be hard to even remember the damn thing, let alone manage to hack through it. I backed out of the menu and waved the phone around my apartment. Again, just a camera app and nothing more. Nothing about a UPP, no discernable place for a notification center. Strange.

Maybe it was a glitch, I thought. Some sort of game or something that was still in development and that my brother was testing. He had said that was what he was here for. Maybe his company had bought land on North Brother in order to install some servers or something. I shrugged and put the phone back on the coffee table, turned on Netflix, and got comfortable on the couch.

——————

I wanted a burger. More specifically, I wanted one from a little spot on 7th street. So I took the subway from my Brooklyn apartment all the way up to the East Village and started making my way down St. Mark’s Place. I really couldn’t tell you why, but I brought Pete’s phone with me. I guess I’d just absent mindedly put it in my pocket.

So I bought my burger, but the place was full of people. I decided to just take it to go and that I’d eat it, colder, in my apartment. A little disappointing, for sure, but not really the worst thing to ever happen. I stuffed the thing into my backpack, walked out of the restaurant and started making my way back to the subway.

That’s when the phone in my pocket started vibrating. I took it out, looked at the screen and saw the same notification as before:

Upp in vicinity. Proceed with caution.

I was about to unlock the phone to see if maybe the glitch from before had fixed itself when I suddenly noticed a man standing in front of me. He wasn’t very tall and wore an oversized and very worn-down wool coat with a bright red beanie on his head. A bushy beard that covered his face almost entirely. His eyes were black, pupils dilated to the point that his irises were gone, and there was a thick layer of dirt that crusted over his skin.

He was holding an old cup which he held up to me and shook. I heard the sound of a few quarters rattling inside and made a move to sidestep him, giving a quiet “sorry, I don’t have any cash on me.”

That’s when he grabbed my arm.

“Food?” He asked with a dead sort of look in his eye and a strange smile.  

“What?” I managed. I could feel the phone vibrating in my hand again.

“Food? I’m hungry.”

“Sorry, I don’t have anything,” I said, managing to shake him off and stepping back. I could feel adrenaline rushing through me, suddenly terrified of this man.

“I’m hungry,” he repeated, stepping forward.

“Sorry, I don’t have anything,” I whispered. I stepped back again quickly, turning around and walking as fast as I could in the opposite direction, crossing the street. I could hear the man repeating the same phrase from behind me in a quiet, sad sort of voice. And my brother’s phone was still vibrating in my hand crazily. I looked down at the screen and saw the same notification repeated over, and over again.

Upp in vicinity. Proceed with caution.

Upp in vicinity. Proceed with caution.

Upp in vicinity. Proceed with caution.

I unlocked the phone and was immediately taken back to the that same camera app. I’m not sure what prompted me to do the following thing, but I found myself turning around and pointing the camera at the man who had just grabbed me.

The shutter clicked automatically the second he came into view; I didn’t even need to do anything. There was no distinct marker for anything, just a super quick flash of the screen and suddenly there was a loading icon. I stared at the phone nervously, wondering why the hell it would take a photo of this man, all on its own. Did it somehow have an ability to know when I’d been put in danger? Had my brother figured out a way to keep people safer or something along those lines?

The homeless man was still repeating the same thing from across the street at me when the phone finally finished loading and a small text window popped up. There was barely any information, just a small bit of text that read:

Upp-3728 identified. Do not lie.

I froze.

“I’m hungry.”

Do not lie? I thought back to my interaction, I’d told him I didn’t have any food when there was a burger in my backpack. What did this mean? Could I somehow be in trouble? Why, or even how, did this thing identify this man? I looked up and watched as a small group walked past the homeless man who stood staring straight at me. They barely moved out of the way, barely avoided him, almost as if they hadn’t noticed him.

I shook my head. No. this was all in my head. Nothing weird was going on. I breathed hard and kept walking down the street, making my way to the subway.

——————

I will never forget that subway ride. I had been standing against one of the doors when we got to the first stop. I looked up as I usually did at the people who got off and on, it was something I’d always loved doing because you never really knew the kind of person that would randomly hop on. But this time I saw the same homeless man standing on the other side of the platform. He was staring straight at me, screaming “I’m hungry” at the top of his lungs. He didn’t move, just stood there. I remember looking around to see if anyone had even noticed him, but they were all just going about their day like nothing was going on.

At first, I chalked it up to just being a total coincidence. Maybe he’d somehow beaten my train to the first stop? I didn’t really care that it seemed impossible to do. How would he have known I’d even gotten on the subway in the first place? How would he have known what direction I was going in, or what cart I was even riding in? It didn’t matter, I just wanted to believe it was just a coincidence.

Then the second stop came, and he was there again. Standing at the edge of the platform, now foaming at the mouth as he screamed the same words over and over again. No one else saw him. No one else reacted. I stared back, terrified, heart sinking deeper and deeper and beating so loudly I could hear it thumping against my ear.

He was there again at every stop, and at every stop he stared at me. I felt him watch me as I got off and sprinted towards the exit, could feel his eyes on the back of my head. He was there, somehow, when I got out of the subway, standing on the other side of the street, and he was waiting for me in front of my apartment building.

“What guy?” one of my neighbors had said when I’d tried to casually point him out.

And now I can hear him outside of my apartment door, screaming that he’s hungry. I tried eating the burger, but it didn’t taste like anything. He started banging on the front door about five minutes ago. I looked through the peephole and he was standing on the other side, screaming and foaming at the mouth.

Pete’s phone has been going crazy too. Still the same notification popping up on the screen but no other information. I don’t have a way of calling him, I don’t have a way of figuring out what the fuck is going on and I can hear the man outside has started trying to open the door.

I don’t know what is going to happen to me, but please, if anyone reads this and sees that man on 7th Street, do not lie to him. He will come for you.

Devoid Horror

Sea Tales

I’ve been exploring the seas my whole life. I’ve seen some things. Most sailors and fishermen are pretty quiet about this stuff. They usually just drown all their experiences in alcohol. I’m not shy about my own struggles with rum myself, it makes for an easy way to forget certain things. Plus its sweetness kind of offsets the saltiness of the sea which …

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3 years ago · 2 likes · Mario Esquivel

My last post got some good feedback, so I figured I’d make a new entry for any of those who were interested. Here we go with a few more short stories.

·        Seagulls. I don’t know if many of you have ever heard all the lore surrounding them, but there is tons and it’s honestly not without reason. One of the more well known legends out there says that they are, or they carry, the souls of those drowned at sea. I’m not really sure if there’s any truth to that sort of thing or not, but what I can say is that I’ve legitimately seen gulls flying around in places where you wouldn’t think it’d be possible for them to be. Mostly they’ll pop up way out in open ocean, seemingly out of nowhere too. One moment you’ll look up at the clouds and the next someone points out a single gull flying through the air. The craziest place I’ve ever seen one was Point Nemo. 1670 miles of nothing but ocean in ever direction, and not big land masses either, tiny islands which you could easily miss (the big land masses like New Zealand or Chile are farther) and I looked up to see a single gull flying through the air perpendicular to our boat. I mentioned it to all my boatmates and we just watched it fly on westward until we lost it on the horizon. How it got there, what it had been doing, how it seemed to not need rest, why it was even there… I have no idea or answers for any of that, but seeing them like that is not as uncommon as you might think.

·        I’ve been debating whether or not I should tell this one because even mentioning it is seen as extremely bad luck. It’s something that happens on still nights when you’re far out at sea. Maybe you’ve heard the saying “Red at morning, Sailor’s warning; Red at night, sailor’s delight.” It’s a classic one that pretty much means that a red sky in the morning signals an incoming storm and has been around forever. Of course modern tech makes it so storms are actually predictable, so the saying’s kind of been lost over the years a little bit. What modern tech isn’t able to predict is the other thing that sometimes happens when there is a particularly red morning. Like I said, red morning means storm, but sometimes those storms don’t come, and instead you’re treated to a very, very, very, still, very, very, quiet night. One of those nights where the water’s surface basically looks like a giant mirror and you can’t tell where the sky and stars stop and the water starts. Most sailors will rejoice when they have a night like that, they think it’s awesome that the storm that was coming missed them. That’s when they’ll notice the extra crewmember. Have you ever had one of those dreams where you both can and can’t remember the people that were in it? That’s exactly what this is like. I’ve seen him twice and I know what he looks like, but I also can’t remember enough to describe him to you. I both do and don’t know what he wears. What I can say is that when he appears the only thing you should do is ignore him. Sometimes he will help you haul a line in. Sometimes he will ask you questions or offer you a drink. Other times he will be in a tough situation and will beg for help. Maybe he'll look starved and ask for food and water, or will be seriously wounded and bleeding everywhere. Those of us who have seen him and have survived know to ignore him no matter what. He will eventually leave as the sun comes up. I won’t give more details for now, though. The thought of him terrifies me.

·        This one is a little more specific, and is something that happened a few years back. I was crew for a tuna boat and we’d been out in the middle of the North Atlantic following some Bluefin when we suddenly came upon a 40ft or so sail boat. When we tried radioing it we got no answer so we decided to go check things out. It was a windy day so it took us a moment to catch up, but when we finally did, we realized there was no one on it. This was an extremely nice boat, extremely sleek and modern, basically new, but there was no sign of anyone on board. No captain, no crew, no passengers, nothing. We searched for a couple of hours to see if we could find any evidence of what might have happened, but there was literally nothing anywhere. My captain figured maybe it’d been a solo sailor who might have accidentally fallen overboard. We spent about a day or so searching the waters for anyone floating around but never found anything. I don’t know if that’s what actually happened, or if it was something a little more sinister, but either way, the thought of falling in the water and seeing your own boat float away without you and there being absolutely nothing you can do about it chills me to the bone. If that is what happened, I cannot imagine a harder fate than eventually drowning from pure exhaustion because you just can’t keep yourself above the water anymore.

·        We once got a mayday call over the radio from a ship that was about 50 miles away. We could tell from radar that we were the closest ones to them so we had to turn course and head over for a rescue. The ship we were going to help had run into a dead head in the middle of the Atlantic. If you don’t know what a dead head is, it’s basically a tree or a log that’s washed out to sea. Trees and logs usually float horizontally, so you can spot them pretty easily. But not dead heads. They’re debris that has been out at sea long enough to start to sink, but not enough that they’ll end up submerging fully. What happens is usually one side will lose buoyancy while the other will stay close to the surface, so you end up with a giant battering ram that lies just underneath the surface waiting for a boat to hit it. They’re almost impossible to see because of that, and not only that, but they tend to bob up and down with the waves, meaning they can ram your ship really hard. When we reached the ship that had called the mayday, it was almost completely underwater. The dead head it had crashed into had been picked up by a wave and had run clean through the hull, killing two men in the process. There was blood all over the water and the sound of the crash had called in a few curious sharks that we found circling the crew. Thankfully we made it in time before any of the sharks managed to bite anyone, but those men were lucky. They were all so completely shaken up they could barely talk once we rescued them.

·        There’s this kind of uncanny thing that happens with the sea and messages in bottles. We’ve all heard of them, of course. A person ends up stranded on an island, out of desperation they write down a message and throw it in the water, hoping that someone somewhere will find it and will come save them. The probability of anyone finding the message and actually getting to you in time is pretty slim, and actually I’ve never heard of it even working. I suppose it’s just a desperation thing. What’s weird and kind of hard to explain is what happens to a huge number of people who do throw those messages out there and then end up getting rescued. Sometimes it'll take years, like I’m talking decades or centuries, but the bottles always, always, always, end up washing up somewhere near where the person who was rescued died. Remember in my last post when I mentioned the sea was alive? A lot of us swear up and down that it has something to do with that, like the sea somehow sending a message to those it didn’t end up taking. I don’t really have an explanation, and I don’t find it to be a particularly scary thing, it’s just a strange fact that this happens as often as it does.

That’s it for now. If anyone has any questions about the stories I just told, or even the ones from my past post, feel free to ask them. I’ll do my best to answer them all as best as I can in my next post.

Devoid Horror

Reventazón (Pt. 3)

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3 years ago · Mario Esquivel

Diego sat behind the lamps, where darkness and light meet to form a hazy border of growing shadow. This was his spot, had been his spot since his first night-climbing session when he’d stood in the middle of the light and had looked out into the absolute nothingness around him. He’d felt a surge of paranoia immediately, the very real understanding that anything or anyone could be standing behind him, watching from the shadows in silence, that he would never know that there were eyes on him, that he was so easily exposed to anything even slightly curious, that he was so willfully giving away his position to things that didn’t want to do the same.

From that moment he’d preferred to hide in the shadows, to let himself believe that they offered some sort of protection, a blanket of black that clothed him and kept his pupils just dilated enough that he could catch glimpses of the things that moved around in secret. So he sat with the stillness of the night, the white droning noise of the river’s cruising waters, the doppler buzz of an insect fly-by, and the occasional breaking twig, a possible symptom of hidden clumsy creatures or rotting humid wood.

It was then that he noticed another, less natural sound. Faint at first, and no more discernible than the inconsistent bubbling of water against the river rocks, but still distinguishable from the sounds he’d become used to hearing next to rivers. A high pitch in the distance creating dissonant chords, an unmelodic solo that syncopated unattractively with the river’s steady rhythm. The first thing he imagined was a cat. In pain, maybe, or in heat and in search of a mate by the river’s edge, the kind of sound that can ignite both fear and a certain amount of sympathy.

Diego squinted into the distance where only the occasional white foaming of the water and the dark contrast between tree canopy and sky could be seen. A whiteish point, only slightly lighter than its surrounding black was moving in the distance, slowly swinging back and forth. Diego cranked his neck and shielded his eyes from the glare reflecting off the boulder they’d lit up, hoping for a closer look. He could just barely make out a figure, could barely see its movement wasn’t so much the bobbing and swinging he’d originally thought, but really a sort of swaying walk, a human’s movement that was heading right towards him.

“Up?”

Diego looked at Jota who was staring at him.

“Huh?”

“You stupid or something?” Asked Jota. He looked at Caro and rolled his eyes. The three had stopped fighting hours ago, no real apology having been made by any of them, opting instead for a gradual increase in their interactions.

“I asked if you were gonna go again, or if you just gave up.”

“Oh,” said Diego looking back towards the figure he’d seen but finding nothing. “Yeah I’ll go again.”

“What are you looking at?” Asked Caro.

“Nothing. Thought I heard a cat,” said Diego. He looked down at his climbing shoes and tightened their Velcro straps.

“What?”

“Like crying. In heat.”

“Crying?” Asked Caro.

“I didn’t hear anything,” said Jota.

Diego shrugged.

“You get a look at it?” Asked Jota.

Diego looked again. The white figure was still gone. Caro tried to say something but was promptly shushed. Diego stood, moved closer to where he’d seen the figure, insisting on quiet.

The river was frothing, flowing as always, a moth smacked its wings hard against the lights, crickets chirped around them. The crying was gone.

“I can’t hear it anymore,” said Diego.

“Did you see anything?” Asked Caro.

“No. Nothing.”

“Fuck this,” said Caro, taking off her climbing shoes and grabbing her backpack.

“Caro calm down,” said Jota. “It was just a cat.”

“We don’t know that. He said crying.”

“And?”

“And I already stayed her after dark for you even though I didn’t want to. Enough is fucking enough,” she said, throwing her chalk bag in her pack.

“I said cat,” said Diego. “Cat.”

“You ever hear a cat crying? What if it’s La Llorona?”

“Oh come on, if anything it’s those other guys fucking with us,” said Diego.

“That’s even worse!” Caro was sitting now, her back to one of the boulders, the cave they’d been working on to her left and the river, Jota, and Diego in front of her.

And suddenly the noise was back again, the same polyrhythmic yowling Diego had heard before, only louder this time, closer.

“You hear it?” Asked Diego as Jota nodded. Jota looked around the cave boulder, towards the source of the noise off in the darkness, then grabbed one of the lights and pointed it in that direction despite Caro’s quick protests.

“You see anything?” Asked Jota, moving the light around.

“Nothing,” said Diego. “Might be too far for the light.”

“Sounds closer, though.”

Jota looked over at Caro who was now breathing hard and fast, holding her hands over her ears, asking why they hadn’t left yet.

“Caro, hey,” he said, giving Diego the light and walking over. He bent down towards her and put his hands on her shoulders gently.

“Relax, dude, if it’s not a cat, then it’s those guys from before,” he said.

But Caro just shook her head. With terror in her eyes, she looked up at Jota, begging for them to leave immediately.

“Don’t tell me to relax,” she managed. “Please.”

“You’re scared?” said Jota half laughing. “It’s cool!”

Caro nodded.

“We need to go.”

Jota sighed, turned and walked over to Diego who was still trying to find the source of the noise, holding the light over his head and moving it in all directions.

“Hey man, Caro’s really freaking out,” Jota whispered.

“So?”

“So I think maybe we should just go.”

“Why? Try to calm her down,” said Diego.

“I tried.”

“Oh so you want to leave too?” Asked Diego, as he let the light fall to his side, turning to look at his friend who nodded and shrugged.

“This is bullshit,” said Diego. “Fucking perfect boulder, what the fuck?”

“I know it’s not ideal, but we can come back in the morning,” said Jota. But Diego only shook his head and raised the light back above his head.

“It’s just those two guys, that’s it.”

“Yeah probably.”

“Talk to Caro, dude. Please?”

“I’ll see what I can do to calm her down. See if you can find the fuckers.”

Jota grabbed his street shoes and walked over to Caro who was still on the ground, hugging a stuffed backpack full of her gear. He sat next to her, began to change his shoes as he spoke.

“You know cats have like barbed dicks?”

Caro sniffled.

“They get it stuck to each other and they make some really weird noises. Can’t really blame them, right? Fucking sucks. But anyway that’s probably what we’re hearing, you know?” He said. Caro said nothing.

“Listen. It kind of sounds like two animals, right?” He was slipping his last shoe on when he realized, suddenly, that the noise had stopped. Jota looked up to see Diego standing still, head tilted, having clearly noticed the same too.

“I don’t hear anything,” said Diego.

“Me neither.”

“We can still leave, though, right?” Asked Caro.

Then it hit them. A wave of cold, like walking into a building blasting AC in the summer, only without wind. Overwhelming, sharp, humid cold that freezes the marrow in your bones and stings nostrils. Jota breathed through his mouth, upward towards his eyes, watched the warm air from his mouth, a smokey vapor that disappeared into the night, felt his lungs as if they had hands wrapped around them, squeezing his breath as a line of fear ran in hot contrast from the back of his neck down to the soles of his feet.

“Light,” was all Jota heard, a whisper from Diego who had turned off the lamp in his hand and who was moving towards one of the two that were still on, the farthest from Jota and most exposed of the three. Jota scrambled forwards, straight toward the cave where the third lamp lay, crawling hard and bruising his knees on the rocky ground. They reached the lanterns almost at the same time, a blanket of dark descending on them fast.

They stayed still, barely wanting to breathe. Diego could see Jota kneeling in front of him, just under the cave’s roof, and Caro to his left, still pushing her back into the wall behind her. He waited as his pupils dilated slowly, his vision improving, a panoramic view of the river only blocked by the cave boulder. Slowly, the sound came back. Closer, even closer than before, Diego could hear it coming just from behind the cave boulder, from behind Jota, a sharp, painful screaming that ripped icy canyons in his soul. For a minute it continued with its source still unseen, pure sonic pain personified.

Then he saw her.

From what little light he had, Diego could see her move sporadically, with sudden spastic shakes that would overcome her, cause her to dash here and there, the excited near-cusp of an infinite search for the unattainable. Shin length black hair moved behind her, a schizophrenic Rapunzel, unkempt and greasy, lagging after her head’s wild veering. She wore a dress that may have been white but waw now badly torn, tattered, and discolored to an ugly deep grey that shook at the shoulders as she moaned and begged in broken language. She was barefoot, lunging in and out of the water without a splash, any shoes having been worn down and fallen long ago, the skin up to her ankles permanently stained darker, what seemed like dried blood from perpetual pacing in the dimness.

She was on their side of the river, just far enough that it should have been impossible to hear her, the noises coming from her body drowned out by the water. But somehow, that was not the case. Her crying, whimpers of pain at the moment, was clear and dampened the noise around her. It was a quiet, resigned sort of moaning, a polyrhythmic and painful agonized jazz that danced with the occasional ounce of hope as she jumped at rocks that most resembled the shape of a child’s head.

Diego stared in horror, frozen by the cold air around him and holding his fists tight so as to not let out a whimper of fear. This was without any doubt, the same thing he’d seen earlier, the same thing that had turned to look right at him, the same thing that had sent shivers down his soul.

“Diego,” a barely perceptible whisper came from behind him. Caro. Diego turned to look at her as she huddled wide eyed and trembling. Tears flowed from her eyes, slow and constant like the river around them and her finger, held close to her body was pointing to his left. Diego’s eye’s widened as he turned quickly in sudden realization.

It wasn’t Caro who had whispered his name.

But there was nothing around him, Nothing had been standing behind him, nothing that he could see at least. La Llorona was completely gone. Diego turned a few more times, then looked at Caro again, confused. She was still, frozen in the same position, pointing behind him. Diego turned again to look towards the river, towards where he was sure La Llorona would be, but again he found nothing. She was gone, and suddenly Diego realized her crying had stopped.

He looked to his left. He’d seen Jota’s kneeling there as he’d been moving his head around in a panicked search, had just barely noticed him out of the corner of his eye, an unconscious mental note. But his eyes only landed on shadow, the full darkness of the open cave he’d hoped to climb. There was no lightness of skin anywhere to be found. Jota was gone.

“Jota?” He let himself whisper, barely, terrified of being heard, desperate to find his friend. There was no answer. He turned again, another half circle, dizzying, in a search for Caro, to maybe lock eyes with her and ask her somehow in silence if she had any idea where Jota had disappeared to. His eyes landed on Caro’s spot on the ground and found nothing.

Diego was alone.

Darkness fell hard on him. Alone, he panicked, breathing heavily and still searching, searching for the friends who had somehow disappeared without a sound, without any sort of warning. Caro who had been sitting, Jota who had been kneeling. He turned in circles between each, hoping desperately that they’d somehow reappear where he knew they were supposed to be. The shadows around him grew, darkened the already dim light, erased the stars, killed the sound of the river.

Alone.

Then the crying started again. It broke through his ears and zapped down his spine, sending flashes of heat that rattled his bones and shook his skin until the hairs on his body stood magnetized and itching to leave him. The crying came from behind him, from the river.

With a cold dead breath, Diego managed to turn his body one last time to look directly into the eyes of La Llorona.

Leaking dead eyes. That was all that Diego saw before he ran, before his legs burnt with exertion and he fell on the riverbed rocks he’d so easily hopped over before and twisted his ankle. Leaking dead eyes, black pain and the hopelessness of a fruitless hunt were welded in his mind, a vision impossible to forget or even ignore.

Diego ran and ran as the air pierced his ears with the high pitched sounds of complete anguish, terrified to face those eyes again, to look at grief personified. He ran, heart exploding, ears ringing through the sand and rocks, limping and screaming at his ankle’s sharp protests at every footfall. He ran without looking back until he reached the small opening in the foliage where he and Jota and Caro had come through from the road. He ran and jumped between banana leaves, smashing his way through green with machete arms that chopped through everything and bruised themselves in his desperation.

In his mind he could see the car on top of the hill they’d slid down. That was all he needed to get to. After that he could figure out some way to find Caro and Jota. But first would be safety, the black metal box above the mud. Diego chopped through one final branch of leafy green and screamed.

The river was in front of him. The same beach he’d come from. The same bend to his left that hid the boulders where he and his friends had been all afternoon and night. He was back. Somehow in the same place despite not having turned around at any point.

And again, the darkness around him descended from the sky and the air turned even colder than before. And Diego felt a hand, cold and thin and wet, that pulled him steadily toward the river.

Devoid Horror

Reventazón (Pt. 2)

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3 years ago · Mario Esquivel

Three

The river was wide and deep, its quiet current an inveterate whisper that pushed like wind on the large rocks that domed over the surface. Pools collected here and there where stone limited and slowed water, hosting small fish, guppies mostly, that fed on the insects that darted through the humid air. These were not small banks, but large collections of varying sizes of rock, many small enough to be considered sand, that spread out on either side of the river, a giant wasteland left by defeated dammed water not yet conquered by the towering vegetation behind it.

It had taken the three climbers a little over thirty minutes to get to this bank from the car, having traveled along a muddy road, under thick bush of dark tropical green littered with multicolored unidentifiable flora, and over a multitude of leaf-cutter ant trails as thick as the river itself and flowing just as quickly in dark flashes of pulsing red. There was not a single large boulder in sight, only a bend in the river that turned left under a canopy of trees and dirt, the beginning of a steep canyon that had been carved by millions of years of rushing water.

They moved quickly, but stepped cautiously, judging the stability of the rocks below their feet, careful not to twist ankles, and in silence for the time being, the expectation of what they would find around the bend pushing hard on Jota who had long ago taken the lead. He’d felt his heart drop, mortar rounds of disappointment falling over these sandy trenches, once he’d peaked past the green of the jungle and had seen nothing of potential around him. He had looked over at Diego with a smile on his face, doing what he could to hide the bitterness he could feel spreading inside him.

It was all so damn ironic, given the fertility of the tropics, the fruits that grew ad infinitum on the trees around them, the unlimited wildlife that sprouted from every corner. Jota was exhausted by the constant disappointment of coming up empty handed when countries not far off had entire areas with so much readily available rock that it would be impossible for one single person to climb it all during their lifetime. It wasn’t something he knew how to bring up to his friend, that he was, and had been for some time, considering just giving up on the entire endeavor. It was a hesitance that he’d felt earlier at the bar when he’d found himself preferring to stay and drink beers, the probability of yet another disillusionment looming. Were they really wasting their time with all this searching given how much good rock had already been found elsewhere?

But this was his baby, the Costa Rican bouldering community, and as much as he felt right now like it was just about time to let go and let it grow on its own without him, his heart was still deeply in love with its development. So he walked fast, nearly running, ahead of the other two in a conflicted sort of desperation to find some kind of answer that might be provided by whatever it was that hid behind the riverbend.

What he found was more than anything he could have possibly hoped for, a group of house sized granite boulders, draped from top to bottom with a thick green curtain of moss. Jagged overhangs that formed natural head height caves stood over rocky landings where the occasional rusty beer can glinted in the sunlight.

Diego and Caro were right behind Jota, yelling premature victorious and benevolent blasphemies as they all rand towards the rocks to touch them with outstretched fingertips. At the very least they had found potential, maybe one or two routes that were actually climbable if they were unlucky and the boulders had nothing to hold on to or were entirely too difficult for them to do.

Diego yelled out in gleeful celebration as he walked around the rock, touching dimples of stone that could at some point be used as hand or footholds, kneeling down to look at water smoothed edges of rock perfect and just beg enough to hold your body.

“We got one, boys!” Yelled Caro, ducking under the main roof of one of the boulders to see what else was around.

The grouping of stone contained three giant boulders that formed an almost perfect semicircle facing away from the water in the middle. Outside the circle, the central boulder held the perfect cave-like feature the three had been so excited about, while the other side included a couple of overhanging faces and a rather tall slab that could become a fun warm-up climb.

The other two boulders held the same potential, a couple of hard looking compression lines on an arete for the left side boulder, and a large sloping seam that traversed the entire face on the other. Far more potential, and far more quality than any of them could have ever imagined.

“Caro can you and Diego run back to the car and grab the rest of the gear?”

“Pads too?”

“Nah, just the harnesses and ropes and shit. There’s so much moss, this is gonna take a year!” Said Jota as he tossed Diego the keys to his truck.

Caro and Diego both nodded, turning around to run as fast as they could despite the uneven terrain back towards the car.

When the two of them returned they found Jota sitting at the base of the boulder, nothing yet cleaned. He’d spent the past half hour touching every centimeter of the rock’s surface, looking for holds, imagining the sequence of movements that he would perform once the route was fully clean.

“Was waiting for you to come back before I started,” said Jota as Diego walked up to him, touching the rock with his own hands as Jota showed him where all the holds were.

“How are we looking?” Asked Caro from behind them, throwing a heavy backpack full of gear on the ground.

Diego looked back and froze. There was a figure, a body behind Caro in the distance at the river’s bend kneeling down towards the river’s water on the other side of the bank. A woman, it seemed, with incredibly long black hair that suddenly looked up and stared directly at them. Diego blinked as Jota took a few steps back to get a good look at the rest of the boulder, blocking his view. He moved his head slightly only to find the figure gone.

“Good,” said Jota, looking at Caro. “Good rock. Good friction.”

“Any idea how hard it could be?”

Jota shrugged as Diego snuck a peak behind the two at the spot where he thought he’d seen someone standing. There was nothing. Vegetation swayed slightly in the breeze and still rocks sat next to a lazy water current. He turned again towards the boulder, touching all the holds he could, trying to come out of his little trance and back into the conversation at hand.

“The bottom moves look really hard, don’t they? Easily harder than anything else in Costa Rica at the moment,” he said. “The top stuff, I mean I don’t know. Jota did you look at them?”

“There’s a few crimps up there that could make a pretty good stand start,” said Jota pointing up to a couple of edges at head height.

“True.”

“Definitely something you could do, Caro.”

“The stand?” She asked.

“Yeah,” said Diego, looking over his friend’s shoulders again and seeing nothing, no woman.

“You can probably hold this sloper and just jump up to that crimp, then climb up from there. That’s at least the first thing I’m trying as soon as we’re done,” said Jota, miming the moves as he talked.

“You look at the other boulders yet?” Asked Diego.

“Yeah, there’s a couple other things, but this one’s the jewel for sure,” Jota said as he grabbed a rope from the bag and some gear. He went around the back of the large boulder to see if he could find an easy way to the top where he might be able to build an anchor. The three of them would use this anchor to hang the rope from in order to rappel down and clean the rock they couldn’t reach from the ground. Arduous work, no doubt, but nevertheless absolutely worth it for a climb like the one they’d just discovered.

Noticing that the boys more or less had the main cave route taken care of, Caro walked around to the other side to take a look at a shorter but steep overhang on the same boulder, another completely moss covered wall that faced the river. Caro looked closely at the grooves in the rock, searching for potential handholds that hid behind the green.

Scrubbing was Caro’s least favorite part, especially for someone who vehemently adhered to leave no trace outdoor ethics, destroying years of moss growth was a somewhat painful and often hushed over inevitable part of outdoor rock climbing. It was an unfortunate necessity that most developers tried keeping to a minimum, but destructive nonetheless.

She spent the next few minutes allowing that pendulous movement to become a meditative experiment, almost hypnotic. Her mind was blank. She stopped every once in a while to blow the dirt that clung to the jagged granite in front of her. It was a sate of mind not unlike the one she experienced when she climbed, just without any real physical championing.

Actual climbing is what she looked forward to, what she most obsessed about in her own private little world. There was nothing in her life quite as challenging as a boulder. Mentally and physically, each climb she’d successfully completed was, for her, an act of defiance. Her logged ascents, visible to anyone who might care to look up her social media, beacons and evidence that screamed “look here, this is what I can do with my mind, this is what I can do with my body.” It was ultimate freedom, ultimate autonomy.

This was ultimately a privilege. One that she wasn’t, or couldn’t, be sure that her two companions here were truly aware of. They’d encouraged her for years, yelling and laughing and having fun as she made her way up faces of rock without truly understanding the significance of their hobby, the significance of all of this to her, at least. Caro had talked about this with other girls at the gym, with Marta  especially. It was a talk that they had had in depth the few times they’d found themselves out in the wilderness on their own too, searching for new boulders. In their mutual understanding of the importance of this sport Caro had found a certain level of comfort and strength, one that she suddenly felt lacking at this very moment.

Jota’s comment about her only being able to do the easier part of the boulder he was cleaning had stung more than she’d allow herself to admit, and now as she brushed away at the moss she wondered yet again, despite her efforts to clear her mind, if coming here had been a mistake. She could hear him and Diego talking to each other, so excited and sharing in something she knew she was not a part of, might never be a part of. It was again that feeling of complete loneliness, one that refused to go away. A part of her was gone, its growth killed by uncertainty and negligence, an unnatural disconnect that had left her falling with nothing to hold on to, and a Jota deliberately unaware. Would he ever understand the severity?  

Caro brushed harder and thought of Marta, how similar she was to Diego in her own obsessive sort of way, how the biologist in her would have protested quietly about the destruction their hobby so often wreaked on the moss that covered the boulders they climbed. It was strange for her to have refused to come, strange for her to not have wanted to spend her day running up and down this river looking for all the rock she could find. Marta was just as excited by the prospect of development herself, but her reticence to join, her apparent fear of this place was worrying.

That’s when she felt them. Eyes burrowing at her scalp, coming from the river behind her. That loneliness she’d felt only seconds ago disappeared, replaced by the exact opposite feeling, a claustrophobic and unwanted companion standing behind her somewhere. Caro stopped brushing, listening hard for any crying. This was what Marta had been so scared of. What was watching her from the river?

There was nothing. No crying. Only flowing water and the occasional laugh from Jota and Diego. Were they not being watched? Had they not noticed it? For a moment she thought she heard a faint whimper, a quiet noise that raised that pulled hard on her neck hair. Caro breathed slowly, forcing herself to brush again, to ignore the empty space behind her, the exposure, the inability to hide, the nakedness she felt. It was all in her head. She’d started to think about Marta freaking out and now she was freaking out too. It’s all in my head, she repeated over and over. But that feeling, the eyes behind her that stared and watched her movements, did not go away, did not subside.

Caro turned, immediately leaning back into the wall and accidentally bumping her head slightly on the rock. She looked around. There was nothing but tranquility in front of her, the river flowing lazily, the same bugs darting here and there over the water, vegetation swaying lightly in a breezy push and pull. The paranoia was gone immediately. Nothing was watching. No Llorona staring at her from the river looking to drown her, only the sounds of Jota and Diego’s brushes a syncopating rhythm to the water’s steady drone.

She walked over to them.

“How long are we staying here?” She asked.

“Why?” Said Diego, barely looking up. Caro glanced around the river again.

“No reason, just wondering,” she said.

“You gotta poopoo?” Asked Jota who was hanging from a harness half way up the boulder, brush in hand.

 Caro blinked.

“No?” She laughed.

Jota nodded, was about to go back to brushing when he stopped to stare at something behind Caro, frowning. Caro turned as quickly as she could, a flash of adrenaline heating up her forehead and legs.

A pair of older men were crossing the river. Shirtless, skinny, baggy jeans rolled halfway up their shins soaking anyway, and holding dirty old sneakers in their hands, they stepped with precision, having clearly made this same crossing a few times. The three watched as the men came closer, one man wearing a ripped up baseball cap, the other sporting a slightly greasy beard and both with confused looks on their faces, clearly trying to understand why anyone would be wasting their time cleaning rocks by the river.

“What are you doing?” The bearded man asked.  

Jota and Diego gave quick explanations as Caro caught her breath.

“You going to be here long?” The other asked. Jota shrugged as Diego answered.

“Yeah, this stuff takes a while, you know?”

“Makes sense.”

“What are you guys doing out here, anyway,” said Caro.

“Why?” Asked the man in the cap. Caro managed to mumble an apology as the bearded man laughed, showing a near toothless mouth.

“Just taking a walk,” he said.

“Those lights?” Asked the man in the cap almost immediately after. Jota began to lower himself to the ground as the three of them looked over at their gear.

“Yeah,” said Diego, slowly.

“Why do you have them? Asked the man in the cap, resting his arm on his friend’s shoulder, relaxed.

“Best to climb when it’s cold,” said Jota.

The two men nodded quietly, then gave each other a look. They were frowning.

“Not thinking of staying here after dark, are you?”  

“That’s the idea,” said Jota. The bearded man nodded while the other took off his cap, grunted, and spit on the ground to his right.

“I wouldn’t do that,” he said.

“Why?” Asked Diego.

“Bad things happen out here at night.”

“Yeah, I’m sure they do,” said Jota dismissively. “We’ll be fine, we’ve been doing this for a while.”

“Not what I meant.”

“Then what?” Asked Caro, feeling concern and adrenaline hit her body.

“Just not a good idea,” said the bearded man. He turned, motioning for his friend to follow who shook his head and gave a final word.

“Get out before the sun sets.”

“Sure, whatever man,” said Jota. “Have a good night.”

The two men went on their way,  wading through a small pool in the distance and disappearing down river just as quickly as they’d arrived. Caro and Diego watched them go as Jota jumared his way back up the rope.

“That was kind of creepy,” said Diego, his mind back to what he’d seen behind Jota and Caro.

“More like annoying. They probably grow weed down the river and wanted to make sure we wouldn’t walk in on them or something. Or they’re secretly gay and, you know, same reason.”

Diego laughed, allowing himself to be convinced by what Jota was saying.

“So what, an entire town doesn’t want us going down to the river because they have a secret gay society where they bone each other all day?” Asked Caro.

“Probably. Towns people are religious as hell. What they think is stupid, but you gotta keep secrets from someone if not from God, or whatever.”

“You’re saying this is a big deal?” Asked Caro.

“I’m not saying anything about a big deal or not. None of this is.”

“You don’t need to be crazy religious to think something is a big deal,” said Caro shaking her head.

“Yeah, you would know.”

“At least I fucking care about something.”

"A little too much, maybe.

“Can you two stop fighting?” Asked Diego. Caro turned to look at him as Jota spoke from above.

“I don’t even know what we’re fighting about.”

“Yes you do.”

“Gay people?”

“What?”

“Because you know I don’t care, I’m not a bigot like these people.”

“No, Christ, it’s about you not giving a shit about anything. Again!” Caro was yelling suddenly, breathing hard and nearly shaking. Jota raised an eyebrow and went back to brushing.

“See what the fuck I’m talking about? Nothing is a big deal to you, is it?”

Jota was silent, brush moving from side to side haphazardly.

“We should fucking leave. Three different people have told us not to be here at night, are we seriously this stupid?”

“Leave?” Asked Diego.

“Yes!”

Diego shook his head.

“Ignore her, dude. She’s being way too dramatic.”

Caro stopped for a moment.

“Dramatic?”

“No, I just mea—”

“Yeah that’s your favorite fucking catchphrase isn’t,” said Caro.

“Look, all I was saying is that you, you know,” Jota looked for the right word.

“I what? Care too much?”

“Is this about the thing?”

Caro shook her head again, did her best to keep the tears she could feel swelling in her eyes from breaking out.

“Just say it,” she said.

“What?”

“If it wasn’t a big fucking deal, say it. The what, Jota?”

“I don’t,” mumbled Jota.

“The what!” Screamed Caro.

“The fucking abortion, okay?”

Caro watched him, nodding her head.

“I’m fucking leaving,” she said, turning away.

“We’re not doing this,” said Diego suddenly, standing in front of Caro.

“Doing what?” Asked Caro.

“This. Fighting. Here!”

There was a pause as Diego threw his brush at the rock as hard as he could. Caro winced. Diego continued, angry.

“I don’t give a fuck about your stupid fight. Abortion or not, leave or not. We’re fucking staying.”

“You knew?”

“Yeah, Jota told me. But you know what? It doesn’t fucking matter. We’re here to develop fucking boulders. We’re here because I wanted to be here, because it might be the last fucking time we do this and I’m not about to let it be ruined by a fucking non-issue. So you know, what? Both of you get your shit together and finish brushing this rock so we can fucking climb it!”

“I just think,” started Caro, but Diego interrupted immediately.

“I know you don’t care about this, but seriously. Fucking stop. Jota and I aren’t going to leave. Wait for us in the car if you’re scared.”

Caro shook her head and breathed hard, trying to calm herself down. She decided not to retaliate further and turned around, walking back towards the boulder she’d been brushing knowing fully well she could do nothing at this point but wait out the night.

Devoid Horror

Reventazón (Pt. 4)

Diego sat behind the lamps, where darkness and light meet to form a hazy border of growing shadow. This was his spot, had been his spot since his first night-climbing session when he’d stood in the middle of the light and had looked out into the absolute nothingness around him. He’d felt a surge of paranoia immediately, the very real understanding that …

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3 years ago

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Devoid Horror

Reventazón (Pt. 1)

At some point, someone had built a dam. Power. Strength. Reventazón. Giant burst, a name translated from Spanish. A river with currents so strong it could toss and break you, drag you away, drown you in seconds. Reventazón. A name that meant intensity, that signaled danger, that had carved itself into the mountains with spirit and could be h…

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3 years ago · Mario Esquivel

Two

It was unbearably hot that day. Humidity stuck to the skin, wetting hair and encouraging sweat, thickening any air that was sucked up by nostrils. Jota had parked his truck, a large black metal 4x4 box, under a tree whose shadow had dodged the vehicle completely in the few hours it had been left sitting there. Caro and Diego reeled back immediately when they opened the doors making puffing noises as the extra temperature rushed over them, a preheated oven opened by a too eager face. Jota had made the right call running off to the bathroom and giving Diego the keys. At least the car would be a little more tolerable by the time he got back.

Diego rushed to get the keys in the ignition, turned them and sighed in relief as the AC began blasting him in the face. Caro sat in the front, taking an opportunity alone with Diego to speak.

“Are you and Jota good?” She asked.

“Keep the windows down, it cools down faster than you think,” said Diego.

“I know,” she said.

“Just making sure.”

Diego leaned back but moved away from the seat immediately, burned by the back rest. Caro kept her eyes on him, raising her eyebrows as he tried his best to take out his phone without scalding himself further on the leather, waiting for him to speak.

“What do you mean?” Diego asked finally.

“You both seemed tense.”

Diego shrugged, checked the time on his phone, and got out of the car, walking around to sit behind Caro.

“Nah, just regular friendly conversation.”

“Right.”  

“What?”

“Have you guys talked about the van?”

“Not really.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

Caro nodded and looked out the window towards the restaurant’s entrance. Jota was nowhere to be seen. She turned to look at Diego.

“Has he said anything about me?”

“What about you?” Asked Diego.

“Nothing, just like in general.”

“Like about you going together?”

“No I mean in general,” she said again.

“He doesn’t really talk to me about much.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, you know, guys. I think we need to go check out this spot here,” said Diego. He leaned forward to show a pin he had marked on his phone. Caro took a look and nodded.

“Jota asked the guy where the pool was,” said Diego. “He said it was there.”

Caro shook her head and smirked, not necessarily surprised that her attempts at getting a conversation started with Diego had been completely ignored. So singularly obsessive, his attention was sharp as a needle and spanned an area equally microscopic. The second the old man had mentioned a pool surrounded by large rocks, Diego had been lost, captivated in his entirety by the only ting that man had said that had peaked his interest. There were large rocks somewhere on the riverbanks, they were close to each other, meaning a small area could be built that might attract more climbers, and it was in a spot they had yet to explore. Everything else the man had said had been ignored, everything Caro had just asked had made mosquito bite welts in his mind, the kind that maybe would itch days later, that might get scratched, if at all, once all the rock that needed to be found had been found and all its moss properly scrubbed. Then again, it might just go completely unnoticed, a bubble on the surface that does nothing but turn red before it fades out and is lost.

It was exactly the thing that had made Diego so well known in this small climbing world, but also the thing that made him somewhat difficult to keep around for long enough periods of time. All he seemingly really knew to talk about anymore was climbing. But Caro had long ago resolved to break through that singularity, especially now that Jota’s decision to leave had clearly formed a severe schism in their relationship.

Caro looked out across the street at the bar as its door flew open and Jota walked out with a confident sort of strut and a dumb tipsy smile on his face. That grin was to most an outward expression of pure contentment, a triumph of soul, absolute bliss in perpetuity. He was pantomiming intentionally cringey finger guns at her and Diego as he walked. Caro looked away, fixing her eyes on the space in front of her, on anything other than Jota or his smile. That smile, those apathetic flaps of puffy skin that laughed at her, that bragged about their ability to not give a shit, was all she could think about. How long had she spent explaining self-consciously, misplaced guilt at her own perceived nagging, the seriousness of their situation, the importance and implications of her decision. Would he ever really understand what had been lost, what had been sacrificed? Here he was, the optimistic jester on the streets of Turrialba ignoring Diego’s suppressed abandonment angst, poking fun at a spirit, a woman who had lost a child, completely oblivious or uncaring to the pain being suffered. He’d said nothing to Diego about them. Diego who only knew how to talk about one thing, who had done nothing to reciprocate her attempts at a serious conversation. She’d only hinted she wanted to talk about something, scared to cross some sort of boundary between two best friends. It was a lack of engagement that had left her feeling deeply alone, suddenly gripped with a desire to not be where she was, to be home in her room under a blanket binge-watching some crappy comedy show. Caro breathed in deep and forced a smile as Jota rounded the car. She was not here for them, she told herself, but because of her own thirst for development.

She had joined Jota and Diego on one of their many first ascent quests some months before and had very quickly fallen in love with the idea of discovering, climbing, and especially naming, virgin rock on a trip they’d all done together to El Cerro de la Muerte.

On a mountainside, three thousand meters above sea level, Caro had rounded a corner between two thorny bushes and had discovered a perfect overhung slab of granite, the kind of rock Diego and Jota could only dream of finding. She’d spent an entire day learning from her two mentors, being taught how to brush moss, how to find and remove loose rock, how to properly clean and prepare her first boulder. It took her another two days, days she spent camping in the bitter cold of high elevation, pelted by a persistent gale strong enough to break the mast of a ship, to figure out how to climb the tilted monolith. She would never forget that feeling, that final breath she contributed to the wind around her right as she pulled on the starting holds of her boulder problem. That sense of quiet execution, mind blank with exertion, total physical meditation moving her upwards. She couldn’t hear Diego and Jota cheering her on, couldn’t remember them doing so. But suddenly, and with another breath, she was on top of this rock she had found and prepared, on top of this thing that had challenged her so bitterly with edges so small and sharp they’d made her fingers bleed. And now to name the conquered, The Mark, her first contribution, now forever, to the Costa Rican climbing scene.

She was taken by it, ridden the current of potential permanence, the adventure of discovery. Immediately following that firs trip, Caro had taken to spending countless hours searching the Costa Rican countryside on Google Maps, hunting for boulders and sending every bit of potential she found to Diego and Jota for vetoing. Their lack of sensitivity was not about to take any of that away from her, the feeling she felt, that gut wrenching sense of anxiety that permeated the air around her, a reminder of Llorona, an entity that kept barging into her thoughts, was not about to scare her away. The driver’s door opened and Jota hopped in, making some joke about how disgustingly hot it was that day. The other two agreed as he pulled out of the parking space.

They’d been driving in silence for a few minutes when Jota finally spoke.

“You guys know if McDonald’s is making vegan chicken nuggets yet?” He asked.

Diego looked up at the rearview mirror, making eye contact with his friend.

“What the fuck?” He asked, laughing.

“You know, like tofu McNuggets or whatever.”

“Not as far as I’m aware,” said Caro.

“Cool, yeah, I didn’t think so.”

There was a pause. Then, Caro, unable to contain her curiosity.

“Why?”

“I was just wondering.”

“You’re not vegan, though.”

“Yeah but Marta is.”

“Tofu McNuggets would be disgusting,” said Caro.

“Agreed,” said Diego.

“She hasn’t asked you guys to go vegan? I sure as shit don’t want to be,” said Jota.

“Right.”

“So I said to her, you know, like, I’ll go vegan the day McDonald’s makes vegan nuggets.”

Diego and Caro laughed.

“Mart wants everyone to go vegan,” said Caro.

“Wait who the hell is Marta?” Asked Diego.

“She’s one of Caro’s friends, goes to the gym a bunch, ripped out of her mind, has one of those bull piercings.”

“Bull piercing?” Asked Caro.

“You know what I mean,” said Jota. “Brown hair, lots of freckles.”

“Oh shit yeah, I’ve seen her around.”

“So I realized just now I didn’t actually know if McDonald’s made them.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“So for a second I was like oh shit, what if, you know?”

“Yeah, no, dude. You’re good.”

“You guys are sure, right?”

Caro nodded, looked back at Diego, laughing quietly. 

“Is it cool if I roll down the window?” She asked.

Jota nodded as he turned off the AC and lowered his too.

“Yeah, I’m pretty positive that shit doesn’t exist,” she said louder, leaning her head back and letting the warm wind hit her face. Behind her, Diego nodded and looked down at his phone, typed something and leaned against the car door.

“Speaking of things that don’t exist,” Jota said. “What was up with that Llorona story?”

“I don’t know, but thanks to it we’ve got a lead,” said Diego.

“You think it was all bullshit?” Asked Jota, giving Caro’s shoulder a playful little nudge.

“I’m not freaked,” she said. “Marta was.”

“Honestly, though, kind of a pussy move, right?”

Diego raised an eyebrow.

“The fuck you guys talking about?”

“Oh right, we never said shit,” said Jota.

Caro looked back at Diego.

“We invited Marta, but she didn’t want to come,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah she grew up around here,” said Jota. “We thought she could come in handy.”

“That and I took her with me on my last few trips and she’s pretty cool,” said Caro.  

“She’s the one that FA’d that new climb in in Provi?” Asked Diego.

Caro nodded.

“She didn’t show because she was scared,” said Jota. “Said there was no way she’d come out here at night, that we were crazy to do that because we’d see La Llorona and she’d drown us.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah man, she got all creepy when we said we’d be looking for shit down the river.”

“You think if you grew up with those stories you wouldn’t be scared?” Caro asked.

“Honestly?”

“Yeah.”

“If I was twelve, maybe. But come on, she’s old enough to know they’re bullshit stories.”

“And the guy at the bar?”

“Small town ignorant guy. Nice enough, but you know how people out here are with their religion and shit.”

Caro rolled her eyes and turned back to watch the road right as Jota slowed the car down and turned left off the pavement and on to a dirt road.

“This it?” She asked.

“Looks like it according to Google,” said Diego.

“And all hail the Google machine and its infinite wisdom,” said Jota. “Plus also, like, it’s not like she’s never been near a river at night, you know?”

“The man has a point,” said Diego. The truck swerved steadily, narrowly avoiding the porous dirt left so by years of neglect and near-constant mid-afternoon rainfall. It was the kind of backwoods road you’d expect from a country with no real transportation infrastructure, a patch of land pressed down by some property owner years ago and surrounded on all sides by trees and vegetation so thick the dirt on the ground was a pale skin sunless white. Jota stopped the car, a massive sloping and horrifically muddy downhill section giving him pause.

“Well, fuck,” said Diego. “This wasn’t on the map.”

“It never is,” said Jota. “Guess we’ve got a long approach on our hands.”

Caro grabbed Jota’s phone from the dash, scrolling around to look for the pin they were being guided to.

It wasn’t that far, just down the hill from where they’d stopped to the river, and from there maybe a couple of kilometers along the river’s edge to what seemed like a large grouping of boulders, right between the water and the blooming green of the jungle.

Jota reversed the car, leaving it leaning sideways off the side of the road half way inside a ditch where it wouldn’t bother any other potential passing cars, and the three climbers got out.

There was no discussion on what gear to unload from the car, that conversation was completely unnecessary, even for Caro’s slightly inexperienced person. They walked away from the car with only a backpack each, loaded with a little bit of food, water, a few wire brushes, climbing shoes, and chalk. Travelling light and fast, at least for now, was the idea. This first pass wasn’t about actually climbing anything. It was just a scouting mission, a preliminary in person search for potential stone to come back to. If they found anything they’d eventually head back to the truck for the heavy stuff, the large flood lights, the big wire brushes, the harnesses, ropes, cams and nuts that might be necessary to build anchors at the top of tall boulders in order to rappel from and give any moss a good cleaning. It would probably be hours, days even, before they’d even consider bringing out the crash pads, large mats to throw on the ground and fall on top of.

Caro lead the way, stopping for a second at the top of the hill to look at a pair of drawn out footprints in the mud, an anonymous slide not unlike the black rubber scars you often see pointing towards the edges of highways and roads, the occasional shining metal debris left over from an accident whose true consequences will likely never be known by any subsequent driver that passes through at speed. In a moment she was hit with a premonitory realization, that these same marks on a road always come with a certainty of direction that could not be replicated here in the mud, that the coming or going of this slide was impossible to really identify as an up or downhill. Had this mystery person been trying to stop themselves from being sucked down toward the river? Had they been trying to get back up to the top only to find their feet giving way beneath them to land right back where they had started? It was clear that there was only one possible conclusion to all of this, a realization that jumped at Caro the way a deer jumps into headlights and causes a swerving surge of adrenaline in any driver unlucky enough to encounter one. Whoever it was that had been here before them, whoever it was that had fallen down this hill, had not wanted to be there.

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Devoid Horror

Reventazón (Pt. 3)

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3 years ago · Mario Esquivel

But near Turrialba, just south of the town where the river opened up to form the Angostura Lagoon, someone had built a dam. Someone had narrowed the great river’s water, had turned its frothing foaming rabid white into a stream of muddy blue that now slithered lazily, broken, through the bottom of its own canyon wake. They had revealed rocks. Rocks that had spent their entire lives tormented by the water around them, that had been sanded down into smooth figures that littered the riverbanks.

That was what Diego hoped to find, huge eroded boulders with unlimited potential. That was what he, Caro, and Jota had driven hours to look for, and what they had spent the entire morning searching for. They’d run up and down the river banks, had waded cautiously into the water crossing from side to side bouldering hunting. Their morning had mostly ended in disappointment.

So they sat in a restaurant in the town on old sun-faded plastic chairs that made snapping and cracking noises under their weight. They drank beer. Diego watched the drops of condensation on his bottle glide and land on a stack of flimsy little paper napkins that by now had formed a grey mush. He was trying to not feel like his time had been wasted. So far they’d only found a single boulder that had any semblance of potential, a very normal thing to happen to anyone that spends time searching for climbable rock. But still, the potential he'd seen in his head for this place, the hours he’d spent staring at his computer monitor combing digitally rendered satellite landscapes and the bitter realization of how wrong he’d been about them, had left him feeling a little more defeated than usual.

And there was Jota, ever the optimist, waving his beer around as he spoke and spilling drops of foam here and there on the uneven cement floor.

“And plus I still need to figure out the electricity. And the toilet,” he was saying.

“You’re going for a toilet?” Asked Diego, looking up from the napkins.

“Maybe even a shower.”

“That’ll fit?” Asked Caro as she took a swig of her beer, surprised, eager. Jota nodded.  

“How?” Diego asked.

“It should. I mean, oh man, people do a double thing. Like a shower slash toilet.”

The two stared at Jota for a moment, confused.

“What?” Said Caro.

“Like you have a shower and then a toilet that you know, like, folds.”

“Inside?” Asked Diego.

“Yeah, like foldable.”

“A foldable toilet?”

“In the shower?” Asked Caro.

“Not exactly foldable, what’s the word?”

Another pause as Diego and Caro shared a look and a quick smile, a hint of puzzled laughter on their lips.

“Wouldn’t that be crazy expensive?” Asked Diego.

Jota shrugged and nodded. He took a big swig of foam and immediately slammed the beer down on the dusty white plastic table between them, excited. “Retractable!”

“Retractable toilet in the shower,” said Diego, nodding slowly and looking at the beer that had spilled from Jota’s bottle that had formed a large puddle in the middle of the table.

“I’d no idea that was a thing,” he said, looking up at his friend. “And this goes where?”

“Well in theory I’d put it right behind the driver’s seat.”

“That really the best spot?” Asked Diego.

“It’s the only spot.”

“Not exactly cheap.”

“You said that.”

“I think it all sounds sick,” said Caro.

“Yeah, no, I’m all for van conversions it’s just the toilet seems like a little much.”

“Well what else am I gonna do?”

“Shit in a bucket?” Asked Caro.

Diego and Jota laughed and nodded each taking another sip of their beer and shaking their heads at the idea. The two had met years earlier at one of the only climbing gyms in San José. It was a small warehouse with simple hand-crafted wooden walls and old pre-owned plastic holds bought from gyms in the US that would have otherwise been thrown out. But Diego fell in love with the grungy old training wall and, as a man who had made his living photographing the Costa Rican surfing scene, soon found himself doing the same for climbing. In a matter of months he was the gym’s official photographer and social media manager, completely abandoned all previous surf related pursuits, and began following Jota and a few other prominent Costa Rican climbers on various trips across the country.

It didn’t take long for him to transition from a purely passive entity, documenting the process that makes a boulder in the woods go from anonymous, to named, to climbed, to published in guidebooks and social media for others to climb too, into one of Costa Rica’s most well respected developers. The search for the new was addicting, the excitement of discovery impossible to ignore. It was an obsession he shared at a level that was only really matched by Jota, and which inevitably lead to the growth of a very close friendship.

But Costa Rican climbing is difficult to find and even harder to develop. Thick tropical jungle makes most satellite imaging, and even in-person searches almost impossible. That climbers use wire brushes to remove moss so as to reveal holds underneath is a terrifying prospect to local conservation efforts. That chalk leaves unsightly and unnatural marks on everything that’s touched threatens Costa Rica’s tourism economy. Entire areas of the country with world class potential are outlawed by most entities without prejudice, and climbers are left little but what scraps they can find here and there, usually along the banks of rivers.

Things were frustrating.

In fact the last few areas that had had any semblance of potential that Diego and Jota had explored had proven to be total busts, leaving Diego with a profoundly worrying sense that Jota had begun to believe that the entire country had somehow been climbed out, that all the rock that there was to be found had been found. This, coupled with the fact that his best friend was constantly talking about, and now actively planning on moving into a van and driving up to the USA on a perpetual climbing trip with Caro, had left him with a radical sense of urgency that was, as he had sat listening to Jota talk about the vehicle that would eventually be used to abandon him, being challenged by an equally radical sense of defeat.

“Plus there has to be more stuff down river,” Caro was saying. The conversation had shifted away from Jota’s van and back to the boulders they had yet to find. Caro’s excited words infectious, slowly eased Diego’s quiet protests and prolonged lack of enthusiasm into a glimmer of hope. But this was not a smile without a second edge, as Diego found himself equally frustrated by that same enthusiasm, a somewhat irrational duality compounded by his inability to understand why Caro herself was not doing anything to stop Jota’s apparent decision to leave.

“We should get down to the banks before it gets dark, more chance of seeing boulders,” said Diego.

“You have the pins, right?” Jota asked.

Diego nodded, tapping his phone screen and unlocking it. He showed the other two a dirt road he’d found that would lead them to a marker he’d left on Google Maps, a small grouping of rocks on the Reventazón banks that seemed tall enough to be climbable. It was difficult to tell if these boulders would be any good from a single two dimensional image. All they had to go off on were the small contours of shadow the pixels showed, but of course shadows could mean anything. They could mean a large rock without any discernible holds, could mean simply that the time of day the photo was taken was just so that the shadows were larger than normal, or could mean success and something worthy of a boulderer’s time.

“Oh yeah, I saw these,” said Caro. “They look like they might be something.” 

Jota nodded, finished up his beer, looked at the others’ nearly empty bottles and got up to get a third round, firmly ignoring Diego’s protests. They sat in silence for a moment as Caro looked through his phone, zooming in and out on the various markers Diego had left for himself.

“There’s a chance we find something. One of the girls at the gym is from here and she mentioned seeing tall rocks.”

Diego nodded, breathed out nervously, crossed his fingers, and reached for his phone back.

“I still think we need to leave soon.”

“You’re right, I don’t want to be out there after dark too much.”

“No?”

“I mean, if we have to, fine, but I don’t know, creepy night,” said Caro, taking a final swig of her beer and grimacing slightly at the still lukewarm bitterness of a beer that’s been opened too long.  

“You’ve never had a problem with that before,” said Diego.

Caro nodded.

“I know, I’m just nervous, I guess.”

“Nervous about what?” Asked Jota as he sat back down.

“Beer?” Asked Diego.

“Oh the guy said he’d bring them over,” Jota said. He turned to look at Caro and nodded for her to continue.

“Just the river.”

“Okay.”

“It’s creepy. You guys didn’t feel, like, watched earlier today?”

“I mean yeah, but that’s normal,” said Jota. “Like evolution, you know?”

“What?” Asked Diego.

“Like it’s a river, its where predators drink water,” he said leaning back in his chair as if having proven a point.  

“So?” Asked Caro.

“So we all evolved to get anxious and nervous around one. High alert. The ones that didn’t had the shit kicked out of them by like a saber toothed tiger or whatever.” 

“I guess that makes sense,” said Caro.

“Is this about something else?” Asked Jota.

“No, I just haven’t ever felt so paranoid before,” she said. “it’s stupid.”

“It’s the Llorona thing, right?”

“No,” said Caro.

“That’s a thing?” Asked Diego.

“It’s not,” said Jota.

An older man in shorts and a friendly beer belly peaking from a tattered polo shirt walked over to their table, three opened beers balanced on a tray.            

“It so is,” said Caro.

“She’s just freaked because some chick at the gym told her to be careful about this stupid—”

“Fucking stop, dude,” said Caro.

“Alright, fine, it’s a thing in like,” Jota paused as the waiter placed his beer in front of him. “Thanks. In like the sense that it’s a legend. No one’s ever seen it. It doesn’t exist.”

“Then why all the stories?”

“Everyone’s read the Bible, doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“I’ve seen her.”

The three looked up. The old man was standing, arms crossed low over his stomach, a serious look on his face.

“You three out here looking for her?” He asked.

“No,” said Diego. “We’re here for vacation and we think one of our friends decided not to come because she was scared she’d see her.”

The old man nodded.

“You saw her?” Asked Jota, but the old man only raised an eyebrow and looked down at the floor. “Was she crying?”

Jota immediately caught a glance from Caro, who gave him a “no shit” sort of look that made him snicker and nod.

“She was,” said the old man. “I was younger. Maybe about your age. It doesn’t exist anymore because of the dam, but there was a place down the Reventazón, maybe a couple of kilometers down the river from here, where the water was blocked by these giant rocks. It’d form a perfect little pool with just enough current that the water wouldn’t go bad.”

“Rocks?” Asked Diego.

“Yes. Four or five of them, so big they stopped the water. Used to be the water was fast, you know? Formed a perfect pool.”

Diego nodded. The old man continued speaking.

“We’d go party there at night.”

“Bet you got a lot of ladies there, huh,” said Jota. The old man laughed. Caro shook her head and sighed.

“What happened when you saw her?” She asked.

The old man’s expression changed suddenly, and he got close to the three, speaking softly.

“You know how the story goes, she killed her child, regretted immediately. Cursed to look for the soul she murdered forever on the banks of all the rivers of the world. She’ll never find a thing, and she will always cry. That’s what we heard. It was a small group of us. We’d taken some beers down to that pool and had almost finished them. Dead at night, too. Back then you didn’t need lights because there weren’t any. Not in this town, at least. We’d made a small fire so we could dry ourselves up when we got out of the water. I was sitting next to it, talking to a girl I’d been dating when the fire went out. Big fire, too big to just blow out with any wind. But it turned off like that,” he said and snapped.

“Then what?”

“It got cold. This place doesn’t get cold like that. Not so suddenly. You could feel the heat getting sucked out of the air by the water. Then we heard her. My friend Tomás heard her first. It was quiet, coming from around the bend. Crying. It got louder and louder. The worst sort of crying you could imagine. I’d never felt that sort of pain before, haven’t felt anything like that since. Don’t think I ever will. We sat there near our pool, saw a woman come around the bend, on the other side of the river. We held our breath as she passed us crying. Then she was gone.”

The three of them were quiet for a moment, taking in the story as the old man stood straight again. Jota took a swig of his beer, then looked at the old man.

“How’d you hear her?” He asked. The old man looked at him, confused. Jota looked at Diego with a smile, triumphant.

“It’s the Reventazón at full strength, right?”

“Yeah,” the old man said.

“It’s loud.”

Caro shook her head. The old man agreed.

“Very loud.”

“Yes.”

“So how’d you hear her over the sound of the water? Especially if she was on the other side of the river?”

The old man paused and nodded, then sighed.    

“Tomás and I have been asking ourselves that exact same question for over fifty years, kid,” he said and walked away.

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Devoid Horror

Reventazón (Pt. 2)

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3 years ago · Mario Esquivel

I’ll keep this brief, I’ll keep this simple. I don’t know how much time I have left, but maybe someone will be able to help.

I found an English phonebooth, bright red paint chipped and slowly fading, green moss taking over, windows so filled with grime it was almost impossible to look through them, white TELEPHONE sign turned a rusty orange and a crown carved on all four sides under a dusty roof. It was exactly like every phonebooth you’d expect to see anywhere in London.

But I found it in the woods, and I was in Maine.  

I’d been hiking out into the backcountry for about a day or so when it just sort of appeared in front of me. I was walking between a pair of trees when I heard a rustling off to my left, maybe a bird or something, and when I turned my head back it was there, right in front of me.

Now know I shouldn’t have, but I walked up to it, pulled on the door. The hinges were rusty and it took a bit out of me to get it open. Inside was like any other booth you can imagine, big silver box, silver buttons, silver coil, slit for coins, and a black receiver. I was lightly brushing off some dust from the box when it rang.

I nearly broke the windows, heartbeat pounding in my ears, almost as loud as the ringing. The ringing. A tiny bell vibrating somewhere inside the box. Could payphones even be called? I’d never used one before. I stared at it for a moment, watched it ring a third time.

Then I answered it.

I can’t exactly explain what was going on in my head. I picked up the receiver hoping it’d make the sound stop. It did, of course, but as for why I decided to put it to my ear, well, I’m just not really sure. Not that it made much of a difference anyway, there was no sound coming from the other end. No static, no dial tone, just a dead receiver. I hung the phone back up and walked out.

My first thought was that these things must run on electricity or something. I was in the middle of looking around for some sort of power chord when they showed up.

Two guys. One of them in a light blue jean jacket. I can’t really remember the other one. They asked me a bunch of questions, asked me if I’d touched the booth, asked me if I’d interacted with it in some way, if I’d heard it ringing at all.

I freaked out and lied. Told them I’d just walked up to it and hadn’t touched it. Had just been looking at it when they showed up. I asked them if it was theirs and they didn’t answer, just said something about me staying put. I didn’t listen. Got out of there the second they’d turned their backs and they never came looking for me.

I’m home now. It’s only been a day, or, at least that’s what I think. I don’t know anymore. I noticed it last night when I was making tea. Or this morning. Whatever it was. I counted to sixty while letting it steep and put my phone’s timer on. When I was done counting my phone said twenty minutes had passed, but I counted normally. I remember counting normally. My tea was cold, and it didn’t fall right when I dropped it. I mean it took longer than it should have to hit the ground. By just a second at most, but enough to not look natural.

I started writing this a minute ago. A minute ago the sun was coming through my window. Now it’s about to set. A minute ago I started hearing the ringing again. It was coming from downstairs. Now I can hear it at my door.

I had a GPS tracker on when I saw the phonebooth. These are the coordinates.

45.569289367492644, -69.39480829179423

I doubt it will still be there, I’m guessing those guys must have taken it, but if it is, do not answer it.

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Most sailors and fishermen are pretty quiet about this stuff. They usually just drown all their experiences in alcohol. I’m not shy about my own struggles with rum myself, it makes for an easy way to forget certain things. Plus its sweetness kind of offsets the saltiness of the sea which is pretty nice.

I found a Search and Rescue Officer’s post on Reddit talking about some really creepy stuff. I suppose it’s my turn to do the same but with the watery part of the world. I hope it’s okay if I use the same format he did.

• I’ll talk about Point Nemo first. For those of you that don’t know, Point Nemo is an area in the South Pacific. It’s the most desolate place on Earth. At Point Nemo you are the farthest away from land you could possibly be, about 1600 miles in every direction. There is nothing there. Like literally nothing but water. No wildlife, no signs of life whatsoever. Radar just goes completely silent for days. There’s not a lot that can prepare you for being in open water. I don’t mean the roughness of the sea, I mean the sheer isolation of it. Turning around in circles and seeing nothing but horizon, knowing that what basically amounts to a few planks of wood or steel is the only thing to stand on for miles is an extremely off-putting feeling. I’ve seen some inexperienced people lose it completely after just a couple of days. It’s weird, but so much open space and such a comparatively tiny boat can get extremely claustrophobic. Most of us go through point Nemo so drunk we can barely stand just so we don’t have to think about how alone we really are. What’s really crazy about the place, though, is how all kinds of fish seem to actively avoid it. I’ve chased schools of tuna hundreds of miles out more times than I can count, but they always seem to make a 90 degree turn as soon as they start getting close to Nemo. Sharks, whales, even dolphins all do the same if we ever see them out there (which is rare). I don’t know why, none of us do. None of us have ever really talked about it. None of us know what’s down there, have ever detected anything on any of our instruments or even heard of anything bad going on. But that feeling of pure loneliness, claustrophobia, all of that, it always gets in our heads.

• The sea is alive. She listens. Ever heard of sailors talk about her as if she’s got a personality? There’s a reason a lot of us refer to it as a “she” and it’s not just old superstition. I think the best example I can give are rogue waves. They’re this weird phenomenon that happens every so often, almost always at night. A completely random wave, massive, that just shows up out of the blue and hits your ship like an angry bull. It’s a huge mass of water that rushes on to the deck and can easily push you over the rails overboard. Last time this happened was with this one guy that joined our ship last minute. The guy was a whistler. I don’t know how much you know about old sailing superstitions but doing that is considered really bad luck in our world. We warned the guy not to do it, told him the sea will hear him but he didn’t listen. One night when the sea was perfectly calm, a single wave came out of nowhere and hit us. Three of us were on the deck that night, including the whistler who got swept out to sea. We never saw him again, didn’t even hear him scream for help, and the sea went back to being completely calm as if nothing had happened.

• This one isn’t really supernatural, but I’ve seen it happen to another boat and it was terrifying. The ocean floor has a lot of volcanoes. Sometimes they can erupt and when that happens they loosen a ton of bubbles that can break the water’s surface tension and cause anything to sink. Watching a boat full of people slowly sinking for no apparent reason, knowing the people on board would suffer the exact same fate and being unable to do anything about it because you’d drown yourself if you go too close is probably the most helpless I’ve ever felt in my life. I still have nightmares. What’s worse is there’s nothing you can do to detect it until it’s too late.

• I don’t know if many of you have ever been out at sea when there’s fog. Sometimes it drops down on you out of nowhere, I guess pressure differentials will just make some clouds drop like rocks. Other times you’ll see it just floating in front of your boat like a dark grey theater curtain. That’s the kind you usually want to avoid completely. I’ve had captains totally change course on us in order to avoid a fog like that, even though the fish we were following were headed that way. Sometimes, though, you just can’t do anything to avoid it. Fog at sea is usually extremely heavy. I’ve been on some pretty small boats, 70 miles out on tiny 30 foot fishing boats where you couldn’t see the bow because of the fog. It’s on those really deep fog days when you’ll start hearing chatter on the radio. It always starts with a bunch of static that will come and go in short bursts, then like a really high pitched sort of wail before the voice comes on. It’s always the same, a super raspy and deep voice. Definitely a man’s, and it always says the same thing. Repeats it a bunch of times. I won’t say what it is, I’m honestly too scared to write it down, but you’ll really want to answer it to try and help. Most of us know never to do that. Ever.

• We don’t really have a name for this one. Most of us just call it “That Place” and most of us know exactly what we’re referring to if we mention it, which is extremely rare. I’m pretty sure it’s where the idea that the number 13 is unlucky comes from, and I’ve only ever seen it a couple of times when we’ve been far out at sea. The first time it showed up we were almost out of supplies. We’d been chasing another school of tuna for miles and had decided to take the risk, a few days rationing food and water a little more than usual in order to catch a few extra fish and make some more money. Desperate times, I suppose. We were a few hundred miles out by this point, middle of nowhere, with about 3 days’ worth of water left and about five days left before we’d make it to port. I was the first to spot it. An island that just popped up out of nowhere on the starboard side and seemed to get closer even though we were perpendicular to it. When it got close enough I noticed it was pretty small, just a couple of palm trees around a sort of turquoise lagoon. There are three things I remember perfectly about that day. The first is that the second I pointed The Place out to my captain, he just quietly and slowly shook his head “no” and didn’t mention it again. Neither did any of my boatmates. They barely even looked at it, basically tried to avoid doing so. The second, is that between quick sneak peeks at The Place I managed to count the number of palm trees. Exactly 13. The third, and weirdest of all, is that palm trees are tropical and we were way up near the arctic circle.

• Last one. Anyone here ever heard of the doldrums? It’s a horrible place to find yourself in. It happens way out when you can’t see land anymore. The sea will go completely still. I’m talking about so still the whole thing basically looks like a mirror. There’s no wind, there are no waves, no sound, nothing at all. It’s one of those things that happens in hotter climates usually, which means it gets unbearably hot. Remember that feeling I mentioned when I was talking about Point Nemo? The overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia and existential loneliness? Multiply that by a thousand. The thing about the doldrums is they can sneak up on you. Sailors back in the day were terrified of them because no wind in your sails meant you could be stuck in the exact same spot for weeks, even months. Once steam engines were invented most of them thought worrying about doldrums would be a thing of the past. They were wrong. You see, most scientists will tell you that doldrums happen when wind currents just go straight up. It happens in the tropics because of the differences in temperature between the water, it’s surface, and the atmosphere above. What no one has been able to explain, though, is why the engines sometimes stop too. I don’t know why it happens either, all I, and most other sailors who have ever been stuck in them know, is that something is holding you there. We don’t know what they look like. Only those that don’t survive them know that, and they never live long enough to describe what they see. Usually they just throw themselves overboard screaming, swim away from the boat as fast as they possibly can and don’t stop until they drown from exhaustion and panic. But you do hear them. They’re whispers. Directly in your ear, like if someone was behind you, and they always start about thirty minutes after you get stuck in the doldrums and don’t stop until they’ve taken someone to the depths or get bored and let you go. I’ve never been able to understand what they say. Have never really wanted to try to do anything to find out, just the thought of it terrifies me, and honestly, the three times I’ve been stuck there I’ve spent my time in hell as drunk as I could possibly fucking get.

As therapeutic as this whole thing has been, I think I need some rest. There’s plenty more to tell, though, and I’m happy to give more details if anyone is interested.

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And as we grew up all those little white lies started to unravel. Kids figured out about Santa at the appropriate age, stopped thinking gum would stay in their stomach for seven years, grew past all those naiveties. All of them except the woods.

There’s something wrong with those woods. My parents said it, my grandparents said it, my teachers and neighbors said it. Don’t go in after dark and that was that. There was no further explanation and any questions just got you yelled at. And that was the thing, you wouldn’t get scolded for asking about any of the other lies adults told you. You’d maybe get a look of sympathy or something along those lines. But with this? You could tell there was genuine fear behind the yelling.

And it’s not like there was any evidence that anyone was making any of this up. No one went in those woods after dark and those that did either came back broken, or not at all. John Pfeiffer, the guy that used to own the town’s liquor store was one of them. He’d gone deer hunting one early November morning. I suppose he must have followed a pack of them too far or something, I wouldn’t know, I don’t hunt, had lost track of time and wasn’t able to make it back before the sun set.

His wife spent the entire night at the edge of the trees screaming his name. The sheriff had to tie her to a tree right outside my bedroom window to keep her from running in there after him. And so she stayed there, arms hanging from a branch until sun rise, my parents on the back porch watching the whole time to make sure she didn’t go anywhere. I stayed in my room the whole time, like I was told, but that didn’t stop her sobs from coming through the window. I can still hear them, and I can still see her fallen moonlit silhouette. She was already mourning at that point.

They found John the next day but he wasn’t the same. Just muttering some incoherent sounds and shaking. I never really got to see him, I was too young, but that’s what people said he sounded and looked like. That’s what everyone looked like if they came back. And once they did, there was nothing to do. They wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t drink water, wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t move. Like the last of their energy was spent stumbling out of the woods and that was that. Nothing left.

The one person I saw like that was Doreen. She and her twin sister Becca decided the whole thing was bullshit back when we were high school sophomores. They went in at night despite all our warnings. Despite everyone’s warnings. I don’t know if that makes Doreen brave or stupid. I don’t know if it even matters. Well Doreen came back but Becca did not. We tried asking her but again, she just stood there and then fell to the floor foaming at the mouth and murmuring something no one could understand over and over again. I remember her eyes, bloodshot and baggy, like if she hadn’t slept in three days, wide and darting all over the place, the only real amount of movement she made after coming back. And Becca, well, Becca was never really found.

I guess that’s why I’m writing this now. Because I know that I’m either going to be a Becca or a Doreen in a couple of hours and I suppose I just hope someone will find my body with this note so I don’t give the old parents an awful scare when they see me wide and bloody eyed.

So yeah, take this whole thing as an apology. Because for what it’s worth, I really am sorry. Maybe this is dramatic, I don’t know. Let me clarify, because I don’t think all the weed was morally wrong, but I know Mom and Dad will be disappointed to find out what I was actually doing, and I wish it wasn’t something that’d hurt them. I guess Fred and I panicked when the cops showed up at our front door. Jumped out the back window and ran straight into the woods. We weren’t high or anything, just not thinking straight, not realizing we were making a pretty solid mistake coming in here.

I’ll admit it took a bit for us to figure out what we’d done. Not the law breaking, the running in the woods. By the time we realized where we had actually run to, when all the initial adrenaline spikes had come down and we actually looked around and saw nothing but trees and darkness and nothing else…

We did our best not to panic. I mean we’d both heard all the stories and knew what had happened to every single person that had done what we’d done. So I guess this is my way of giving back somehow. Like maybe if I can just record whatever it is that goes on here it’ll help someone figure out something. So here goes, because I really don’t think I have much time and I just wasted a lot of it with all this explaining.

Fred froze when he realized where he was. Like panic froze. Started shaking and being all quiet. I didn’t know what to do. I tried shaking him and moving him and yelling at him but nothing worked. I even slapped him a few times. He was just terrified.

So I eventually just told him to stay put and that I’d try to retrace our steps a bit to see if we could actually get out of here. There was this little path sort of thing that seemed to go back towards the town, or at least the direction I thought the town was in. So I followed that for a bit, and I left Fred by a big seven foot tall egg looking boulder.

I must have walked for about ten minutes rounding the side of a steep ass hill. I could hear a river off to my left. The moon was out so I could kind of see in the dark and there were crickets that somehow made me feel a bit better about the situation. Then the path just went up towards the top of the hill and I followed it and I got to the top and then I realized something almost immediately once I got there.

It was like going from one room to another. There was a different energy or something. The air before had been cold and crisp, but suddenly I was hit with a wave of heat and humidity. Uncomfortable and very much in your face and everything felt so much heavier for some reason. And then I realized the crickets were completely gone and I couldn’t hear the river anymore. Total silence. I know people say deafening silence and all that cliche stuff but that really was what it was. You could feel that ringing in your ears that sometimes happens when things are really, really quiet.

So of course I started sweating immediately and I could feel all of me just start to shake like something was wrong. The back of my neck had this weird pressure behind me, like that sensation you get when you’re going up the stairs in the dark. And I knew, I knew completely, that something somewhere was watching me.

And there was nothing I could do. I looked around but everything was too dark. I thought maybe I saw a couple of dots of light up in the trees. A pair of eyes or something. I didn’t stick around to figure it out. Just turned around and ran back towards Fred as fast as I fucking could.

Fred wasn’t where I left him. Like he’d just disappeared. So I started yelling out for him. Just screaming his name at the top of my lungs. I figured it didn’t matter if whatever was out there heard me, it was probably watching me anyway. And for about a minute there was no response. Until finally I heard Fred off in the distance. So I ran towards the voice for a bit and then stopped and yelled out his name again to see if I was closer.

Fred yelled back again and this time I was closer for sure, but that’s what let me realize the problem. Fred wasn’t Fred. His voice sounded wrong somehow. Like… different. Just slightly off, kind of like when someone uses too much autotune, but not an electronic sound. I don’t know how to describe it but fuck it was awful, like a very subtle and more guttural nails on chalkboard sort of sound. The chills I felt when I heard it nearly made me fall to the floor. And it was calling my name.

How the hell did it know my name? It was slightly off in its pronunciation, like when a parrot is really good at talking. I ran in the opposite direction the second I realized what was going on. Ran as fast as I could as far as I could before I had to stop and rest and catch my breath. And now I’m just sitting here behind a tree, writing this thing.

And I can still hear it out there, calling my name. Calling my name every few seconds or so, sounding more and more desperate, like afraid. Making it sound like if Fred were afraid, like trying to trick me into going toward it. But I don’t think it matters. As far as I’ve been able to run and as well as I think I’ve hidden it keeps following and I can feel it getting closer.

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