“Just stay on the boat, Billy. If I’m not back in half an hour, go ahead and call the Coast Guard, but just stay on the boat,” Jake ordered, as I leaned over the rail and passed the skiff’s bow line down to him. Those were the last words he ever spoke to me.
It only took him two pulls on the oars before he nosed the little boat into the rocks of the island’s shore. Our trawler was anchored only twenty yards away. Jake tied off to a low hanging branch near the water’s edge, leaving the skiff to bob on the swells beside the dinghy our skipper, Ray Dalton, had taken ashore maybe thirty minutes before. Jake glanced back, gave me a little half salute, then picked his way over the rocks, disappearing into the stunted and sickly looking trees.
I’d been crewing on Dalton’s fishing boat, a thirty-nine foot trawler named the “Naughty Mermaid,” for a few seasons now. I was no old salt, not like Dalton and Jake, but I’d been sailing in these waters long enough to know that there were no islands around here. Never had been. Still, here I was, standing on the prow of the Maid, as we called her for short, looking at a tree covered pile of rocks poking up out of the ocean.
I became a fisherman because I had always been fascinated with the sea. Ever since I can remember, I was in awe of her mysteries and I wanted to know her secrets. But this? An island out of nowhere? This was plain crazy. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.
Two days ago, we’d put out from port to fish for bluefin and marlin off the eastern shoals. Dalton had planned to stay on the water all week, but by the end of the second day, he didn’t like the look of the weather and decided to take us in. Gray clouds with dark bellies hung low in the evening sky. “Like satin lining on a coffin lid,” the skipper described it. Cutting the trip short was no big deal. Only seventy or so miles out, we could be back in port by midnight, sleep on the boat, and put out again the next day, once the storm passed. At most, we’d lose half a day’s fishing. This late in the season, it really wouldn’t matter.
The Maid was still thirty miles from shore when the island showed up on radar. The stars were thick and bright, but there was no moon. Jake was below deck, reading or sleeping, and Dalton had let me take the wheel. It was a good opportunity for me to get some experience piloting the boat at night, using just the instruments. He hovered nearby, keeping a close eye on me without making it look like he was keeping a close eye on me. Dalton was a good skipper. He had a reputation for taking care of his crew. Even better, he knew where the fish were and almost always finished the season with a profit. Plenty of more experienced deckhands would have tossed their own mothers to the sharks just to sail with him, but he had hired me right out of high school. Not many of the other fishermen would take on an inexperienced kid, but Dalton claimed it was easier when he didn’t have to break the bad habits crewmen had learned on other boats.
He spotted the island on the radar first.
“Idle the engine, Billy,” he said around the smoldering butt of a Winston, tucked into the corner of his mouth. “Check your scope.”
I glanced over at the screen. “What the hell? Where did that come from?”
“Good question. Best let me have the wheel,” he said.
I stepped aside, taking a closer look at the radar screen. Judging by its signature, the island was about a half mile long and maybe a quarter mile wide. We were on a reverse heading back to port, meaning we had sailed through this exact same area two days ago on our way out to the shoals. There had been no island then.
“Keep an eye on our depth, will ya?” the skipper said.
I looked at the glowing display of the depth finder. “Says eighty feet,” I reported.
“Eighty? We’re still over the continental shelf, but there should be sixty fathoms under the keel!” Dalton exclaimed. “Sing out when we hit thirty feet.”
Dalton called Jake to come up on deck, as he coasted the Maid to within twenty yards of the island. When I told him we were at thirty feet the skipper dropped anchor and shut down the engine. He flicked his cigarette butt over the side and played the beam of the boat’s spotlight across the rocky shore.
“What happened,” Jake asked, stepping into the pilot house, his lopsided grin visible in the glow of the instruments. “Kid get us lost?”
Dalton fished a fresh Winston out of his shirt pocket, lighting it with a well worn Zippo. “GPS says ‘no.’ ‘Sides I was here the whole time. I think I might have noticed if we’d gone astray.”
Jake held up his hands. “Just joshing around, skipper.” Jake was like that. He was always busting my chops, but never in a mean way. It got a little annoying on occasion, Jake didn’t always know when to quit, but it was just good natured ribbing.
“Maybe it’s some kind of geological protuberance type thing? Like there was an underwater earthquake that pushed it up?” I offered.
Dalton shook his head, shining the light on the gnarled scrub trees lining the shore.
“Naw. It’s got trees,” he said without rebuke. “They ain’t big, but still, it takes more than two days to grow trees.”
“So, what do we do?” Jake asked.
“I’m gonna go check it out. You two are gonna stay here and look after my boat. When I get back, we’ll figure out how to report this and who to report it to.”
The skipper went ashore, disappearing into the stunted trees. A half hour later, Jake followed, and I was all alone, standing in the pilot house, shining the spotlight back and forth. The only sound was the water, lapping against the rocks at the island’s edge. I wasn’t a smoker, but I had a hankering for one of the skipper’s Winstons right about then.
According to my watch, only twenty minutes had passed since Jake had rowed away in the skiff, but I couldn’t take it anymore. I grabbed a high powered flashlight from the emergency locker and made my way to the end of the bow pulpit. Training the beam on the trees where my crewmates had disappeared, I began to yell.
“Skipper! Jake! Sound off if you can hear me!”
The island wasn’t that big. The air was cool and dense. Sound carried on nights like this. They should’ve been able to hear me just fine, and, if they answered, I should’ve been able to hear them just fine, too. There was no response.
“Dalton! Jake!”
A splash to the right got my attention. I snapped the beam of the flashlight towards the sound. Ripples spread in a wide arc from the island’s edge, maybe a hundred feet away. They were too big to have been made by a man. The water was dark and murky, but when I angled the beam downward, I saw a form, just a shadow really, shooting along under the surface. I couldn’t get any real sense of its shape, but it was huge and it didn’t look like any fish I’d ever seen. It darted beneath the boat, leaving a wake powerful enough to swing the Maid on her anchor chain.
A cold chill shot through me, from the soles of my feet to the hairs of my scalp. Suddenly, I felt very exposed, standing out at the end of the pulpit with nothing but a fiberglass plank between me and the water. I scrambled back to the foredeck and into the pilot house. In the same emergency locker where I’d found the flashlight was a twelve gauge shotgun, made of stainless steel with rubber grips. I dropped the flashlight and grabbed the gun, then lunged for the radio.
Something thumped against the hull of the boat. Something big. The boat slewed to starboard, nearly knocking me off my feet. There was a rasping noise, like coarse grit sandpaper on a plastic pipe, but much louder, coming from the port side hull. I could feel the vibration through the soles of my deck shoes. Something heavy and wet slapped onto the foredeck. It was hard to see with only starlight for illumination, but I had the impression of something like a huge tentacle, big around as my leg, covered in barbs and claws, reaching up from the water and over port rail. It seemed to slither side to side, touching, testing, tearing gashes in the anti-slip coating on the deck. I only hesitated for a second, before I dropped the radio mic and slapped the big, red distress beacon button, mounted to the bulkhead above.
Dashing out of the pilot house, I made for the mid deck hatch, nearly tumbling down the ladder in my rush to get below. I locked myself in the forward berthing compartment, pressing my back against the far bulkhead with the muzzle of the shotgun trained on the door.
Suddenly, the boat listed so hard to port I thought it was going to capsize. Jake’s seabag, full of clean underwear and paperback western novels slid out of his bunk and smacked into the side of my head. A crash sounded from the galley as canned goods, china, and flatware spilled from the cabinets. Something keened like a tea kettle on the boil. It took a moment to realize that sound was coming from me.
A heavy thump shook the upper deck and the boat righted itself. The rasping sound returned, this time coming from just overhead. Glass shattered and I heard the squeal of rending metal. My hands shook so badly, I thought I might rattle the shotgun to pieces.
The crashing and smashing above me carried on for several more moments, then suddenly stopped. The cabin was filled with a clicking noise, like the drag on a fishing reel, but deeper, more powerful. It was answered by a thrum from below, its frequency so low that it was more felt than heard, saturating my flesh and shivering my bones. Goosebumps rose all over me. Every hair on my body stood on end.
“Our Father, who art in Heaven. Our Father, who art in Heaven,” I whispered over and over. I knew there was more to that prayer, I just couldn’t remember what it was.
The boat listed hard to starboard. There was another loud splash and the Maid rocked back and forth, flinging me from side to side between the berths, until she finally settled on an even keel. All went quiet. I stayed where I was, too terrified to move. The shotgun remained aimed at the door, as I breathed that prayer over and over.
I must have fainted. I have no idea how long I was out before a loud pounding brought me back to my senses. Something was trying to smash its way into the cabin. The door rattled in its frame, bulging under the force of each impact. Splinters flew as the wood around the lock gave way and it flung open. I thrust the shotgun out in front of me and yanked the trigger, screaming. The firing pin clicked on an empty chamber. I’d never racked the slide.
“Holy hell, dude! What’s wrong with you?” the Coast Guardsman who had kicked in the door shouted. He crossed the cabin in two strides and snatched the gun out of my hands. “You could’ve killed me!”
I looked up, taking in the dark blue uniform and the bright orange flotation vest. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I thought you were . . . “
“You thought I was what?”
“I thought you were . . . the monster,” I said.
“Monster?” the sailor’s brow wrinkled. “Better get yourself topside. You’ve got some questions to answer.”
Pulling myself up through the hatch, I saw that it was morning. Angry looking clouds hung low over the water, and the sea was beginning to develop a considerable chop. That storm the skipper had been concerned about was moving in. The Maid’s deck was a mess. Equipment lockers had been smashed open. Fishing gear was strewn all around. The searchlight had been ripped from its mount. Jagged shards of glass hung from the pilot house window frames and the gunwall railings on either side of the mid deck were crumpled. The deck itself was covered in deep, long gashes.
“What the hell happened here?” another Coast Guard sailor asked me, this one an officer, judging by the insignia on his hat, but I had no idea what rank.
“We found an island,” I blurted lamely. “It just came out of nowhere.”
“What Island?”
I started to point, but the island was gone. A hundred or so yards off the starboard bow, our skiff and the dingey rolled on the growing swells, both empty. I ran into the pilot house, my sudden movement making the Coast Guard sailors nervous, but I was too freaked out to care when their hands dropped to their sidearms. According to the GPS, the Naughty Mermaid had only drifted two hundred meters south-southwest of where we had anchored the night before. Instead of thirty feet of water under the keel, the depth finder read three hundred and eighteen.
It took a few minutes before I could get my head together enough to tell the story. Even then, I doubt I told it well. I explained how we found the island, about Dalton and Jake going ashore, and the thing in the water. When I finished, the guardsmen all looked at each other and shook their heads.
Two Coast Guard sailors piloted the Maid back to port, with me aboard, while the cutter and its helicopter combed the waters for any sign of the skipper and Jake. More boats and aircraft launched from the mainland once word got out, but the storm made any chance of rescue all but impossible. After three days, the search was called off. An inquest was convened. I was questioned eight different times by seven different Coast Guard officers and the county sheriff, drug tested, and given a psychological evaluation. In the end, the inquest concluded that the most likely explanation was that we had been drunk, collided with another, unidentified vessel, which had fled the scene or possibly sank, and that Dalton and Jake had gone overboard. They were declared lost at sea.
They didn’t believe their own findings. I could tell when they read them at my hearing. They just couldn’t come up with a better explanation. In the end, no charges were filed against me, due to a lack of evidence.
People in town didn’t believe the inquest findings either. The story I had told the investigators was never made public, but word gets around. I became “the Boy Who Cried Sea Monsters.” Both Dalton and Jake had been well liked and respected in the community, and while neither man was a teetotaler, everyone knew that they wouldn’t be drinking out at sea. No one ever came right out and said it, but I could tell. They thought I was somehow responsible for the deaths of my crewmates and had made up the story to cover my guilt. Conversations stopped whenever I walked into the drugstore or the coffee shop. People gave me sidelong glances when they passed me on the street. Old lady MacMurdy even crossed herself when she saw me. My own parents started dropping not so subtle hints that maybe I should talk to somebody “professional” about what I “thought” I saw. Nobody seemed to care that Dalton and Jake were my friends, too.
I don’t really blame any of them, though. If what happened to me happened to somebody else, I’d probably be thinking the same thing.
Once the inquest was over, I emptied out my savings account and moved west, to Rugby, North Dakota. It was rough going at first. I ran through my money faster than I thought I would. Even had to live in my car for a week. Winter was setting in and the cold was brutal, but I finally found a job as a night clerk at a motel and started earning enough to rent a little studio apartment. It was all a big adjustment, new town, new job, new people, but I tried to make the best of it. According to the internet, Rugby was the geographical center of North America. It was as far away from any ocean as I could get.
I’m not interested in the sea’s mysteries anymore. That bitch can keep her secrets.