The Quiet Sea

ENTRY SEVEN

My hand is shaking. I can't . . .

I have to record this. Perhaps seeing it on paper will give me the perspective I dearly need. I thought loneliness would prove my undoing – and perhaps I was right, and this is simply loneliness unravelling my mind. I find I prefer that.

For the alternative . . . The alternative is that I am not alone, and somehow that is far more terrifying a prospect than any type of mundane madness.

I left my journal in the dunes earlier today. Only after I'd eaten and dusk had fallen that I realised its absence. Fearing it would rain in the night, I thought to go out and find it before full darkness rendered the task too hard.

So I left my cottage. For what did I have to fear on this small, isolated isle? This isle that has driven all other human beings away? Was it really hunger, I wonder now, or did something other cause their exodus?

The character felt different as soon as I stepped out, air pressing close and cloying in my throat. I only understood why when I reached the dunes and saw the sea. The water was still as death. A placid sea can lull with gentle licks on the sand, but this wasn't a restful quiet. This was stagnant, moribund, and haunting.

The sea should not be silent.

I should not have worried for my journal, for the cloud had cleared and stars were out and the half-moon that hung above the water was bright. So you understand, I could see everything. I know there was nothing there. And I know there was.

I had found and picked up my journal when I heard it. A splash. And then a dragging, gurgling sound, like the noise created by an oar as it draws through the water, or a leg as its owner wades through the shallows.

It was close. I stood and scanned the shoreline, but the sea was smooth and unbroken. Another splash. Another dragging sound. A pause, and then again, faster now. Again, again. Still, nothing!

I confess, reason left me at this point. Intelligence had deserted me, replaced by a terrible, consuming dread. I knew with a certainty I cannot justify now that there was something in the water, and I could not let it catch me.

I fled, stumbling over rocks that sought to trip me in the dark and fighting free of brambles, paying no heed to the scratches I procured. I think I would have run all the way back to my cottage had I not fallen and bloodied my knee. The pain gave me back my wits, though I wish, deeply, that it had not.

One unexplained noise I can write off, as unnerving as it felt in the moment. What happened next, I find harder to dismiss.

Slower now, and with more caution, I got to my feet and continued up the path. Hearing nothing behind me, the claw of fear loosened its grip, and so when I spied the ruined cottage watching me from off the path, I merely felt an unpleasant jolt. I haven't grown used to them, those abandoned dwellings, lonely ghosts of the time before. Their darkened windows never fail to bring out in me an uneasy shiver when I pass them, even in daylight when the shadows aren't so deep and consuming. I've cut no paths to them, leaving the undergrowth as a thick barrier between me and whatever darkness resides in their empty rooms.

Something made me pause before this one tonight, and as I looked at the moonlit granite, the bush before its empty maw of a doorway shivered. There was no wind to move it. Nothing around it stirred.

Before the first had stopped its motion, the one in front of it began to sway, followed by the one in front of that. Underneath the tall ferns, whatever set the leaves to swaying was headed in a straight line towards me.

This time when I ran, I didn't stop until I had my back pressed against the inside of my cottage door and the bolt, for the first time since I arrived on this island, pulled across, shutting out . . . I don't know what.

I do know that this will be another sleepless night.

I hear nothing now.

I'm afraid.