Read No Evil: Anthology of Terror

Hungry Waters

This short story was written by WeHoardCats

There are dead men at the edge of Astoria.

They speak in shuffles and whispers. In cold patches of air and nail marks on tender, burning backs. They twist in the shadows; a peripheral movement, a flash of black, a curtain pushed in a breeze caused from nothing and cast from nowhere.

They limber from the waters where the ships they once boarded splintered apart and sagged to the bottom of the ocean. They move in the mist, limping fog men with voices that crawl through the many planes of the afterlife to break through a pin-sized hole in the universe. To find you. To touch you. To snarl low and deep in your ear:

Alana.

"Did you just say my name?"

Lilly's ember eyes scrape over me with a flare of apprehension. "Lana, I didn't say anything. If you're too freaked out, maybe we shouldn't do this."

But they're already waiting, spread out among tealight candles, on the long, slate stone that leans just over the water's edge. Waves build in the frigid wind, misting Greg's hooded shape in a faint blue spray. Kelly leans over the candles to light another, and Emma digs at some dirt beneath her nails. The river air carries the faintest smell of tootsie rolls and caramel.

"God, there you are," says Emma. Her dark, silken hair has turned unmanageably frizzy by the moisture of the Pacific. She eyes me slowly, with the skeptical gaze of a temperamental street cat. "Can we get this over with? It stinks like fish and Halloween's gonna be over in like an hour."

"I was starting to think you wouldn't come at all." Kelly wipes her hands on the knees of her jeans and stands with a candle in her palm. Behind her, the river swells, pearling with what spatters of moonlight reflect through the gossamer clouds. The aura sticks to her silhouette, a golden halo around her blonde bangs. She's dressed like a devil. A fitting costume as she props her hand on her hip and scowls crossly at us. "We killed our flashlights waiting on you."

I don't tell Kelly the truth--that time didn't kill them. That there's no point in bringing electronics to the coast of Astoria because at a single breath of salted air, batteries drain and devices malfunction, and then not long after, people go missing.

"Sorry. We stopped by Lilly's house for supplies," I say instead, passing Lilly an amethyst necklace. She floats behind me to drape the chain around my neck and latch it in the back. Once she's done, I do the same for her.

"What's that?" asks Emma.

Lilly gives her gemstone a fond twist against the hollow of her throat. It turns a patch of her dark skin lilac in the moonlight. "It protects against spirits," she says.

"Oh come on. You can't tell me you're into this new age shit too." Greg stands and stretches his back with a crackle. Then he turns and launches his empty energy drink into the ocean. The waves lap it up, greedy and starved. "Fucking millennials."

"Millenials?," Kelly says with a scoff. "We're all Generation Z, you idiot."

"Not me," says Emma. "I may have been born in the two-thousands, but my heart's in the eighties."

"Whose sad Instagram story did you steal that from?" Kelly thrusts a candle into her hands. "Take one, so we don't fall in a ditch or something."

A lump settles in my throat, and it feels for a moment like I've swallowed a peach pit. It eases when Lilly looks to me and smiles. When she clasps my hand and whispers in a tone as ghoulish as the ghosts of Astoria, "Are you ready?"

I'm ready.

We lead the others to the fisherman's dock, where Lilly and I usually spot the spirits in the mist. Most often, they're phantom ships that met their fate along the Oregon coast, their energy still residing in the fickle waves. The apparition of their tall, billowing masts sail along the horizon several nights throughout the year—but particularly in the month of October. Lilly thinks it has to do with the ever-shrinking veil between the living and the dead, but sometimes I wonder if October was when those ships saw their last voyage.