I explored a house floating on the sea

Ghost ships are more common than you think, but don’t get excited. Only takes one mistake for a boat to get loose from port in a storm, and there are millions of yachts all over the world. A well made ship can float on ocean currents for years, so long as it stays away from any rocks. Can be decades before it ever crosses paths with someone.

Most boats have AIS on them. Little signal that lets the world know who you are and what you’re doing. A smart owner will also have GPS. When ships get loose, the owners usually contact the coast guard who’ll go pick them up. But sometimes, for whatever reason, the beacon might not work or the owners might not have had them on there. In these situations, you’ll only know if you’re close to one of these things when they pop up on the radar.

I’ve had this happen once, and unlike most lost ships it hadn’t been because of a storm. It was a yacht that had been owned by a family holidaying in Thailand. They’d gone out for a short day trip. Logged it with the harbour, then never came back. There was a search, but no sign of them was found. Six years and a couple thousand miles later, I saw the Sun Kist float into view, emerging from the cold morning vapour like a ghost in the fog. I knew it wasn’t manned from the way it moved. The way its wooden bones creaked mournfully in the cold and damp. When I reported it, the coast guard gave me the bad news about the boat’s circumstances. Told me I had to moor with it and wait till someone came to pick it up. This wasn’t just lost property. There were grieving relatives out there waiting to hear news of what’d happened to this missing family.

I had an obligation.

I didn’t want to. Something awful sad about a lost boat, but the Sun Kist felt somehow worse than that even from afar. The sails lay unfurled on deck, all bundled up like bodies in the morgue. Fabric lifting gently in the breeze. I tethered my own ship to it and climbed down, listening to the unnerving silence of a perfectly calm sea. 

Below deck looked like a war zone. Smashed plates. Table snapped in half. Ceiling panels loose. I wondered if the boat had gotten tossed around inside a tornado. Maybe the family had gone overboard all at once? But when I checked the master bedroom, the door had been wedged shut. It opened just enough to let me it wasn’t locked but that was it, so I went and found a window that let me look inside.

Someone had piled everything they could find up against that door. They had even used random bits of wood to reinforce the barricade. But there was no sign of who’d done it, just an empty room with no way in and no way out. The only other thing of note was a bedsheet they’d draped across one wall and painted the image of a house onto. Looked like a manor with a tower, one lone window at the top all lit up. The house itself was painted so it sat on top of rows of wavy lines, making it look like the house somehow floated on water.

It was a strange addition to an already extremely strange situation, and something about it got under my skin. I went back to the door and kicked hell out of it until the whole thing broke down and I could get in.

The stink was terrible. Sickly sweet but rancid, like a mouldy apple core you find crawling with wasps. To step inside I had to push my way through shin-high piles of old clothes and plastic bags full of bottled piss and excrement. The bed was done up like a nest, telling me that someone had lived there in squalor for God-knows-how-long.

Begged the question, why? I wanted to know. Had to know. Found myself thinking it was the picture that had answers, and I stared at it for longer than I’m comfortable admitting. Had the parents gone overboard in a storm and left the child alone? Was that picture just some kid’s way of remembering their lost home?

When I reached out to touch it, something from behind it reached out to touch me in turn. 

The effect was like the whole world dropped out from under my feet. I got so scared that I cried out and fell over trying to get away. I tripped over festering sheets as my legs struggled to make sense of the panicked signals from my brain. One hand sank into something cold that was both dry and wet, but I didn’t bother stopping to check what it was. I ran like hell, breath hitching in my chest like a toddler trying to control their sobbing. Even as I climbed my way back on deck I kept telling myself it was just the wind that’d moved the sheet. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake the impression that there’d been a dark shadow behind the light linen fabric. Something reaching out towards me.

A child’s hand.

But of course, that was impossible. I figured I’d just let my nerves get the better of me, but the second that someone in a position of authority arrived, I got the hell outta there.

It wasn’t until a few years later I heard the story of the Tilhuist house, so named for the island it had once presided over from the lofty heights of a Hebridean cliff. I’d taken on a job tutoring rich kids who wanted to learn sailing, and was busy working with an eighteen year old called Carl. He was in dire need of help getting his qualifications with the RYA to try and improve his personal statement. It was his gap year, and his last round of university applications had gone pretty badly. In return for letting him aboard my own yacht, his parents were willing to pay me a hefty bit.

Surprisingly, his father also paid for a cook to join us. He was a strange addition, especially since I’m used to sailing either alone or as a pair. But he was damn good at his job, and I appreciate the warm meals.

“They’d fallen out of favour with the Crown,” he told me casually while frying an omelette one morning. “Happens a lot with noble families. So the island was seized and given to the military, but the old goat who ruled the roost refused to give up the family home. In a final act of spite, he used every last penny left in the coffers to have the house shipped, whole and intact, from Scotland to America.”

”What? Like they took it apart brick by brick and just put it back together on the other side?” Carl asked.

“No.” The cook grinned at me like he was telling a joke. “They dug out its foundations and slid the house onto a barge waiting by the coast. Hundreds of men worked day and night for months to do it.”

”What happened?” I asked.

“It sank.” The cook burst into laughter. “The family was ruined,” he added. “The father moved alone and penniless to America and faded into obscurity.”

He laughed again and served us our food, but later that night I did my own research and found a photo of the house as it left shore. It looked like most stately homes, only it had been dragged down a hill and placed, as if by magic, onto an enormous barge. That alone was weird enough, but what really kept me staring was the tower. Even in the grainy black and white sepia photo, I could tell it was lit up from within.

A house floating on water, with a single tower and a lit up window…

–

It was twelve months ago when Carl reached out to me. He didn’t want more lessons, but he did want some help sailing to America. He knew I spent most of my time over there, and I was experienced at making the crossing. For whatever reason, he didn’t want to make it a family trip and needed someone to act as a guiding hand. I got the sense that some tension had risen between him and his parents, but it was none of my business. The only caveat was he had a girlfriend he wanted to come along. She was new to sailing, and he didn’t want to risk that long a journey without someone else experienced on hand.

I agreed. I’d found him to be a good enough sailing companion in the past, and the pay was good. Not long after, I was joined by Carl and Alice for a six month journey to Canada which would be followed by a short itinerary South to warmer waters in the USA. My plan was to drop them in the Caribbean where they’d spend a few weeks and then fly back home just before the weather turned.

The ocean crossing was mostly uneventful. Carl and Alice had a few minor arguments. The boy considered himself a hard worker, but Alice had been looking for a more relaxing adventure. He thought she was lazy, but in my opinion she just wasn’t happy bobbing along the empty water with little to do or see. It isn’t a hobby that suits everyone. The arguments weren’t big, but there were a few days where she spent her time sulking below decks with a book, while Carl tried his best to make small talk with me about things like his new job as a paralegal or the opinions of idiots on social media. Despite having little in common, Carl didn’t bother me too much. He was young and well meaning.

Still, I really wish I’d been with someone else during that trip.

After all, it was Carl who insisted we board the Tilhuist house.

The sea was calm when we saw it. Alice was sitting at the bow of the ship with her legs curled up and a book in her lap. Carl was down below, working on something for his job. It had been a few days with no wind, so we were stuck using the motor. I was busy dwelling on the unpleasant sound of the engine and the smell of diesel, when Alice suddenly called out.

“Is that a lighthouse?”

This is a fairly alarming thing to hear when you’ve mentally positioned yourself nearly a thousand miles from the coast you’re aiming for. First thing I did was check the navigation computer in the cabin which confirmed we were in the middle of the Atlantic. Barely a moment later, Carl appeared with a furrowed brow.

“Can’t be,” he said, followed by a glance my way to confirm. I then climbed on deck and found Alice by the gunwale with one hand shielding her eyes from the sun. I followed her gaze and tried to peer through the morning mist that was fast evaporating beneath the heavy sun.

When my eyes alighted on a tower that rose slowly above the horizon, I was filled with a terrible disquiet. It was a silent shape that seemed to emerge from the very water. They were long minutes spent staring, as neither us nor that strange object were moving at high speeds. Instead we trundled towards each other in a lazy crawl. Even when it had crested the horizon and the entirety of it was in view, I couldn’t quite accept what my eyes were telling me. I could only struggle with the growing apprehension that I felt.

In the end, it was Carl who broke the silence, standing there like statues watching a house float our way.

“Is that a fucking house?”

Alice laughed at his words, but when her eyes passed mine, she seemed uncomfortable with the sight. I couldn’t blame her. The sight of it filled me with dread.

”It is a house!” Carl cried. Then, turning to me: “The Tilhuist house! It has to be!”

I filled Alice in on the legend as Carl raced to grab a pair of binoculars. After he had spent a few moments gawking at the house, I took them and looked for myself.

The windows were dark. The front door closed. Bizarrely, the barge was filled with what looked like dead plants. Ferns and bushes turned brown and wilted, arranged in pots and planters like it was just an everyday back yard. And the house itself was far more intact than it had any right to be. The windows were filthy and the roof tiles were missing in places, but the damn thing shouldn’t have been standing at all.

The rubber on the barge’s drums should have failed decades ago. The wood should have rotted. The chains should have rusted, and any ropes should have snapped. I could have listed a dozen more points of failure, all of which should have passed long before I was even born. All of which meant that the house and barge ought to be long under water.

But this was my rational mind protesting. Deep down, I knew that the house was real, or real enough. It was a forgotten thing far outside most people’s attention, and who knows what happens in the unseen corners of the world? And the sea is full of places far outside anyone’s sight.

The house floated in spite of rationality, and no amount of my worrying could change that.

We made no course correction during that long hour, but still the house drew nearer. Looming towards us with a quiet certainty that unsettled me for all its confidence. The house didn’t chase us. It didn’t have to.

At some point, it even slowed down.

It was Carl who had the sense to get behind the helm and take control in case things hadn’t gone so smoothly. I could only stand, frozen in terror as half my eyeline was taken up by the ever growing spectacle of a three-storey manor house. A creaking groaning monstrosity made of wood, brick, and plaster that twisted in strange buttresses and extensions that defied any kind of architectural planning. Only when its timber frame groaned with exertion and its velocity slowed to a crawl and it finally, agonisingly, bumped against my own yacht, did some part of me decide it was time to leave.

I tried to collect myself. Looked around and briefly tried to think of a plan. I had just figured out that I’d tell Carl to hit reverse when I saw a flash of colour in the corner of my eye.

He had climbed the rails and jumped onto the barge.

–

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Alice screamed the words just as her boyfriend turned and gave her a big grin and a thumbs up. He must have heard her, but he clearly wasn’t interested in the warning.

“It’s fine,” he cried, while securing the lines between the two vessels. “What are you so scared of?”

Alice looked at me as if I might offer up some kind of answer that wouldn’t sound insane, but I struggled. The mere sight of him on that floating island was like a shock to the system. Like driving by a tall building and glimpsing someone hanging off the edge of a high window. Most of what my brain kept telling me was along the lines of get away from it because the damn thing shouldn’t exist!

“It might not be safe,” I eventually cried. “It could sink at any moment!”

”If it is the Tilhuist house, it’s been around for a hundred years,” he replied. “Why would it sink now?”

”Because you’re fucking trampling all over the damn thing!” Alice snapped. “Carl, please just come back!”

Growing annoyed with the both of us, Carl sighed and poked a thumb towards the house.

”I gotta look,” he said. “I just gotta.”

He was half-way to the door when I realised he wasn’t gonna stop unless I did something. Finally steeling my nerves, I climbed the railing and found that, once I started taking some kind of action, it got a little easier. Pretty soon I was jumping down onto the strange wooden beams of the barge where I quickly noticed the thin layer of algal slime that made them as slippery as ice.

I had only taken a few careful steps when Alice cried out,

“Carl!”

I looked up to see the front door open and the young man nowhere in sight.

“Don’t worry,” he cried out from somewhere within. “Guys, you gotta check this out. It’s kinda creepy in he—“

His words were cut off when the door slammed shut and there was only the sound of sloshing water and Alice’s growing screams.

–

“Get him! Michael you have to go get him!”

Alice continued to beg me to hurry but I took my time approaching the door. That place was an unknown and it sat strangely on the senses. An old wooden deck covered in ancient potted plants and even a God damned bench, like I was just walking on my grandmother’s patio.

Before I reached the door, I glanced quickly through the nearest window and saw a dust-covered living room in that busy pre-war style you might sometimes still find in the houses of centenarians. Every surface caked with dust so thick that nothing of the furniture’s original colours could be seen. The air was alive with the stuff. Eddies of it whorling in the sunlit rays interrupted by my own shadow. But there was no sign of Carl, only a single hallway with an open doorway, the shadows beyond as black as printed ink.

Taking a deep breath, I pressed onto the door and had just reached for the handle when it was snatched from my hands and Carl stumbled towards me. I cried out in fear, not just as the suddenness of his appearance, but the way he came out of the dark with wide eyes and pale skin. He looked more like a corpse than the lively young man I’d been looking at just moments ago.

He was clutching his one fist in the other, squeezing tight around three bloodied stumps where there was nothing above the knuckles. Blood dripped down his trousers and stomach, and somehow coated most of his face and chin. I barely managed to utter some kind of question when he collapsed forward into my arms and we were both sent falling towards the floor. I did my best to catch him, but the impact was hard on us both. I hurt my back, and he rolled off me, grunting in pain as he moved onto his wounded side. I quickly regained my feet, and began helping him upright. I had one arm under his when he tensed up, freezing like a man terrified. His eyes had fixated on the door behind us. 

It had been left ajar, open no more than an inch.

Slowly, the handle turned, and the door closed with terrifying deliberacy.

–

We left immediately.

The house followed.

We had motored away nearly half-a-mile when the barge, creaking and groaning like a terrifying monster of the deep, began to glide after us. Carl screamed as this happened, even though he was below deck at the time. I might have wondered how it was possible he knew what was happening, but I felt it too. Felt the gaze of that thing upon us.

My heart raced for hours afterwards. Even after I had set our course and climbed down to find Alice gently stroking the shivering face of her boyfriend, I looked around for something that might help us, but there was nothing I could do. Instead I sat anxiously and listened as Carl finally stopped screaming and began to mutter a peculiar but haunting phrase.

“She’d no choice. She’d no choice. She’d no choice…”

Nothing I did could get him to stop, and while Alice was committed to staying by his side, I struggled to ignore his desperate whispers. They wormed their way beneath my skin, and added greatly to the panic I fought to control. After deciding there was nothing for me down there, I returned to the cabin and stared at the sea behind us, lit pink and purple from the setting sun.

I did my best to ignore the silhouette of the house as it trundled in our wake, and instead focused on the radio which I used to try and call for help. But the handset did not respond the way it ought to. Picking it up, I received no signal whatsoever. Turning to the right frequency, I sent out an SOS anyway, hoping to hell that someone nearby might be able to come help. We had an injured party, I said. We needed medical assistance right away.

For a long time there was no response. I began to wonder if the handset was even switched on when suddenly the speaker burst to life. The voice was small and breathy, like a child who’d spent a long time running, or possibly even hiding for their life. 

The words themselves, however, were very familiar.

She’d no choice. She’d no choice. She’d no choice…

–

I took an early shift sleeping, figuring I’d wake up around midnight and keep an eye on things while Alice and Carl slept through until morning. At first I thought I might find it hard to sleep. I was worried about what might happen if the house caught up to us, and my mind was racing with a million other questions about the logic of it all. But stress is a powerful sedative, and sleep came easier than I thought, leaving me in a dreamless slumber.

When I awoke, there was the sense that very little time had passed, but the clock beside my bed told me it was 3am. Any anger or frustration I felt at Alice forgetting to wake me up quickly dissipated as I sat up and the atmosphere of the yacht sank in.

It was quiet. No motor. No flapping sails. No one was out there rustling around in the kitchen or the head. I held my breath to try and listen more closely but there was nothing. It was a long time that I stayed there, before the gentle lapping of a calmed sea was finally broken by three heavy footfalls from the deck above. They were slow and deliberate, and I couldn’t work out where they started and led. But there was something unsettling about their rhythm as they told me nothing about who made them or why.

I grabbed a knife from the kitchen before raising my head above the hatch. It was pitch black out there. No moon. Only stars and the filmy reflection of a seemingly infinite ocean. With the engine off and the battery dying, the lights in the cabin no longer worked and I had to rely on a flashlight to slowly scan the deck, but it was empty. No sign of who’d been stomping around up there, even though only minutes had passed since I’d heard them.

I dropped back down below and looked around for Alice and Carl, but the cot where Carl had lain just hours ago, babbling and whimpering as his girlfriend tended to his savaged hand, was now a knot of bloodied empty sheets. A cup lay knocked over by the floor, and I couldn’t help but imagine some kind of struggle to explain how it’d gotten there, but that told me little about where anyone was.

My first priority was to get power back up, but I soon found that the keys to the engine were missing. Worse yet, the spares were gone too even though they had been kept in a locked draw by the navigation table. Someone had opened it with no muss or fuss, either guessing or somehow knowing the combination to the lock I used.

Accepting that I was stuck in the dark, I began to look for Carl and Alice using just the flashlight. There were only five compartments on that yacht, and I checked each one and then, driven by a growing sense of panic, I checked them again. And then just to be sure, I checked one more time. I circled the quarters, opening doors and whispering, then crying, then shouting for this hideous joke to stop.

But no one came to help.

I returned to the deck and searched there, but there were only a few blood streaks leading to the aft of the boat. I looked overboard, gazing anxiously at the water around me. Had they gone overboard? I tried peering deep into the water below but there was only darkness down there. And then I scanned the distance, but my light struggled against the immense blackness of a moonless night and reached only ten or twenty feet in any direction.

The sea was maddeningly calm. It was larger than all the continents and deeper than any skyscraper. It seemed impossible that I could find myself looking at ocean water where the waves didn’t even break, but instead rolled lazily like the sloshing in a paddling pool. The sea offered not even so much as a breeze to help me get going. Because that was all I needed. Just a bit of wind. With that, I could get myself to busier waters and find real help. But without wind or an engine, I was stuck drifting.

And what of Carl or Alice?

The dinghy that served as a lifeboat was still secured to the aft. If they’d left the yacht, they’d done so by swimming. That was surely an insane thing to do? But Carl hadn’t exactly seemed himself towards the end either.

For a moment, I entertained the question: where had they gone?

But that was a stupid thing to do. No sooner had I slumped into the captain’s chair and let myself think the words than the answer came to me unbidden. Instinctively, I turned my eyes towards the part of the horizon I’d been avoiding. The house was dark against the blue-black horizon. A nearly-impossible to see silhouette that anyone could have missed had they not know what to look for.

But as if it had been waiting, as soon as I looked its way, the light at the top of the house’s tower came on.

–

When I climbed aboard the barge once more, my light caught flashes of that barren garden with its dried and dying plantlife. Chalky fingers reaching towards me from the dark. I moored the dinghy and ignored them, but could not ignore the solitary shoe that lay waiting closer to the house’s front door. It was Alice’s trainer, and the normally yellow and white trainer was soaked in blood that appeared black in my dim light.

I considered calling out for her, but couldn’t quite summon the courage to break the silence. Still, there was no mistaking the path of dripped blood that traced its way from the shoe towards the open door. Terrified as I was, I felt as if I had no choice. Circumstance was holding me hostage. I could return to the yacht, but I doubted that any wind would come to whisk me away.

Instead my thoughts turned to the ghost ship I had boarded all those years before. Had the child onboard seen their parents disappear into the same open door that awaited me? Had they been left, stranded, on that boat? And if so, for how long? Days. Weeks. Months. It didn’t matter. There’d been no easy escape for them either, had there? The scenario played out so clearly in my mind. They had hidden away while something tore the yacht apart, and eventually it had gotten them, leaving only a ruined boat and a long-forgotten shelter.

There was never going to be any magical rescue. My only real chance was to find Carl and get the keys he’d taken.

And I had a pretty good idea where he was.

Opening the door felt like poking a web knowing the spider that made it is hiding deeper in the funnel. As it swung open it revealed a small vestibule filled with what must have been nearly fifty or sixty shoes all piled up on one side. I couldn’t help but notice Alice’s other trainer was there, along with two deck shoes that I recognised from Carl’s feet. The strangest thing about that pile was the way most of the shoes had been placed in an orderly fashion, like they belonged to visitors, not victims.

Beyond, I found a near pitch-black corridor, the walls covered in so many hanging pictures that they almost obscured the floral wallpaper beneath. They were so old that I couldn’t see much of their subjects, except for one of the larger ones that had somehow avoided the worst of decay. It showed the Tilhuist house atop a Scottish hill where its presence seemed a hell of a lot more appropriate. But it wasn’t exactly benign either. The house was not as big as it was now, but something didn’t look quite right either. And the family posing out in front looked like a strange group. Three girls, a mother, and a father. The old man was smiling with a moustache that reached past his chin. But everyone else in the picture could have been attending a funeral based on the expressions they held. It wasn’t just your run of the mill historical sadness. They looked deathly miserable. Grief stricken women facing down a death sentence.

There were a few doors along that corridor. One of them opened onto the room I’d spied the day before. The sitting room covered in heavy dust.

It was no more inviting from the other side of the glass. What I hadn’t been able to see before were the words scrawled across the same wall with the window. They had been carved into the plaster and wood, then daubed over with something dark and brown. The effect was nightmarish, and the words themselves offered even less comfort.

She cut it loose.

Whatever implement had been used, the wielder had driven it so far into the wall it made my skin crawl to think of the strength involved.

Moving onwards I found more places in a similar state. There was a dining room, the plates smashed and thrown across the floor and across the great oak table the words no world would be new if he was in it too. I found a library where the books had been ripped apart page by page. Someone had even draped a blanket across two chairs to make a kind of tent, and it was obvious from the burned books that they’d tried to light a fire. But based on the dust that caked everything, it must have been from a long time ago. Still, I could not shake the eerie feeling I had gazing at the bundled pile of blankets beneath the little tent, and tried hard not to think of a similar nest I had found on the ghost ship so long ago.

It wasn’t long before I decided there was nothing for me on the ground floor, even if I’d only explored half of it. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to continue meandering around that labyrinth until I got lost, but when I finally encountered the stairwell it was obvious from the scrapes and scuff marks in the dust that this was the only place that got any foot traffic. The stairs themselves were a tight spiral, the walls marked half-way up by scratch marks in the paint that made me think of hands scrabbling desperately for purchase.

I climbed them carefully, and found the next floor to be mostly bedrooms. They often appeared unremarkable at first glance, although there were often a few details that unsettled me if I lingered on them too long. One had a wardrobe filled with tally marks and urine stains. Another had long scratch marks beneath the bed, as if something or someone had been dragged out of there with great effort. In another there was a mound of broken porcelain dolls that covered the bed, reaching all the way to head-height. But always, each time I pushed open a door, there was a great disturbance of dust that told me no one alive had been in there for a long time. Instead, I was often left with the impression that I was exploring some kind of mausoleum, keenly aware that whoever owned the wigs or the old luggage stacked up against one wall or the crumbling dress that had been laid out neatly on one bed must be long dead.

And then there was the writing. Much like the ground floor, I found wall after wall covered in short phrases etched into the very wood or stone of the house.

She would rather sink it all.

They were better off drowned than with him.

The house did not sink.

She tried to feed them.

But they starved first.

Each one was a painful verse that tugged at a guilty conscience that was not mine, but which seemed to permeate every inch of that house. Many rooms had the same phrase repeated, and I’ve tried my best to remember the individual ones but I must’ve explored twenty rooms on the first storey alone. Each one quiet and empty but haunted by a distant loss that I could not ignore.

I often thought of the photo. Of the smiling father and miserable wife and daughters. And I remembered that in my research, the only real historical account of the house’s sinking was that it had come loose in a storm and the father had arrived alone in America where he quickly drank himself to death. I tried to imagine what kind of man he must have been.. He’d ruined his family financially just to move his house from one end of the world to another. And that photo? I figured him stubborn. Maybe even spiteful and vindictive. He stood in that photo smiling while his own wife and daughters scowled in the corner. I didn’t get the sense he’d been unaware of them either. In a strange way, his expression seemed as if it wasn’t just the house he was showing off in the photo.

He was almost proud of his family’s misery.

Had his wife cut the barge loose from its tow partway through the crossing rather than spend the rest of her life with him? It made a twisted sort of sense, but that was only part of the picture.

She tried to feed them.

But they starved first.

I had just found the next stairwell and those words were pacing furiously around my mind when I was caught off guard by a door along one corridor swinging open just as I passed it. The motion was quite sudden and deliberate, as if the person on the other side knew exactly that I was coming.

It was Carl, pale as a sheet and with one hand still drip drip dripping blood on the dusty floor. He stared right through me as he lifted his hand to his face and bit slowly into the meat of his palm. Then with a mouth full of his own flesh his eyes seemed to finally find me.

“She was so hungry. So so hungry… First the storm cleared and the barge did not sink, and then the food dwindled and no help arrived. She’d told them early on what to do when she passed. Any mother would make the sacrifice. But God’s cruel jokes were not over. It was them that grew weak first and not her. Them that passed slowly and painfully until it was only her alone in this house.”

Carl’s eyes watered as he swallowed his own flesh and took another bite out of his forearm. I could not help but wince at the cookie-cutter imprint he left in his flesh, and the way the blood began to course upwards with the rhythm of his beating heart.

“She tried not to, Paul. But hunger hurts and in the end… She’d no choice.”

With no real warning, he lunged towards me and drove his teeth into my neck.

We slipped and his bite tore strips out of my skin before skipping off my collarbone. I managed to stumble backwards out of Carl’s grip and stay upright, but he kept going with the downward momentum and landed on his hands and knees. I touched my neck and while the bleeding was profuse, the wound was not deep. I was lucky he hadn’t managed to get any real purchase or he might have taken a chunk right out of my throat.

Carl’s head snapped in my direction from where he crouched and there was a ravenous hunger burning within those bloodshot eyes. In a flash I saw my future self lying there being eaten alive, and the terror drove me to flee just as he sprang forward and grabbed my ankle. I kicked backwards and my heel caught his chin. There was a loud crack, but Carl seemed unfazed by the loss of three teeth and a dislocated jaw. Instead his grip tightened and he hissed a malformed but familiar phrase.

She’d no choice!

I kicked him again. And then again. Striking out over and over until he finally loosened his grip and I was able to flee up the stairs.

–

Carl did not follow me as I emerged into an enormous and open attic space. Instead he remained below, alternating between hungry growls and the upsetting sound of wet chewing. I might have given more thought to what he was eating, but my attention was grabbed by the only two things in that empty place. The first was a wrought iron staircase that led into the tower above. It stood freely in the centre of the dusty wooden floor, its metal steps lit bright by a strange and otherworldly light.

Not far from the bottom step was Alice. She was facing away from me, but the ground all around her was pooling with blood. I spoke her name tentatively as I approached, but she did not react. Every step I took was filled with growing dread as I realised to my horror that she too was chewing, stuffing fistfuls of some strange wet substance into her mouth, sobbing quietly all the while.

When I circled her, I saw that she had been disembowelled and was stuffing her own innards into her mouth. Her teary eyes noticed me then, and turned towards me in desperation and despair.

“It hurts,” she said, her words muffled by a full mouth. “God it hurts so bad. But… I can’t stop.”

She reached a hand out to me and something red and wet slipped out of her palm and struck the dusty floor below.

“Are you hungry too? Do you feel it?”

I would’ve spoken but knew that to open my mouth would invite vomit. Instead I shook my head and stepped backwards.

“No,” she muttered sadly. “No… you wouldn’t would you? She told me plain as day when she came to me.”

Alice looked down towards her own split stomach and sobbed again.

“This hunger is only for parents.”

It was a dreadful realisation that dawned on me as I gazed at her open stomach and followed a trail of splattered blood leading from her prone form to the nearby stairs. The unspoken tension between the couple suddenly made sense to me in that moment, as Alice had clearly been struggling throughout the journey with an unplanned pregnancy.

I stepped away but Alice made no effort to attack me. Instead she continued her terrible feast and I found myself seized by a powerful compulsion. I followed that thin trickle of blood, my heartbeat racing as I climbed the tower and left behind the tragic sounds of Alice’s final fate.

At the very top, I found a small room lit bright by a powerful but impossible light. A kind of golden halo emanating from every window that had no obvious source, but which painted the occupants in a dazzling array of colours reminiscent of stained glass catching the sun. 

A silent tableau. 

A single chair with the withered corpse of a long dead woman, mummified by the salty sea air. And lying all around her feet, huddled close to the hem of her skirt, lay a dozen small children in varying states of decay. Some clutched closely to the fabric, others touched her feet. I stared in horror and wondered if perhaps, among that gathering, lay crouched the body of a child who had once hidden in the depths of the Sun Kist which I had explored years before. Snatched away and taken to this place after the parents had been driven mad by the house’s terrible curse.

Slowly, the eyes of every child turned to look at me, their paper thin-skin wrinkling like old wrapping paper. I was faced with a sea of unblinking eyes and rictus grins that bore receding gums and brown chipped teeth. The world felt light beneath my feet. My stomach sank and all the blood rushed from my head to my toes, turning my scalp and neck to ice. For a moment, time seemed to pause and I was aware only of the distant sobs of Alice and the gentle lapping of seawater that was almost perfectly still. I felt like an intruder bursting into the funeral of someone I didn’t know, the crowded mourners turning to gaze at me in quiet but stunned disgrace. And I waited, rooted to the spot with terror, for something to break the interminable silence, until, at last, something finally did.

The old woman’s body moved to look at me.

She smiled, and I lost all consciousness.

–

Someone carried me to my yacht and set me adrift. It wasn’t Carl or Alice because I remember seeing both lying close to where I’d left them. Memories of something half-glimpsed during my descent, I suppose. As for what carried me? I don’t know. I don’t think I want to know. In a strange way, it was like when you fall asleep as a child and wake up in your own bed, having been taken there by a parent. A terrible thing to admit, given what I’d seen. But that’s how it felt.

Warm.

I spent a few more weeks floating on that calm sea before the wind finally returned and I was back on the familiar choppy waters of the Atlantic. My radio began working not long after, and I was able to call for help.

Unfortunately, I had little to say to anyone that would have sounded sane. With Carl and Alice both missing, I instead opted to clean the yacht of any signs of struggle and simply say that I went to sleep one night and awoke to find them both missing, having likely fallen overboard. Calmed and without a working radio, I was unable to make a distress call, and they were both lost and likely drowned. In a strange coincidence, my GPS beacon had gone on the fritz for a good 72 hours and when they checked my location it had me pinging around the globe, popping up in the Sahara for fifteen minutes, then the Pacific for another fifteen, and so on. This helped corroborate my story of radio problems, and while I wasn’t completely free of suspicion, there was enough water to my story that I avoided any actual charges.

Not that anyone would trust me with tutoring novices in the future. Then again, it isn’t something I’d like to return to. In fact, I haven’t been able to go near the sea since I got back. Let alone step foot on a yacht. Each time I do I remember what I saw clutched close to the bosom of the old long-dead woman.

It was a small half-formed thing that she held in such tender arms. Alice’s unborn child was no bigger than a kitten, and its fresh bloodied skin glistened in the dazzling technicolour lights of that dreamlike tower.

I remember the look of it so clearly…

Just like I remember its first breath, the opening of its eyes, and the impossible wail that followed.