Lily Marchand's first sensation was the cold—a damp, invasive chill that seeped through her woollen mourning dress and gnawed at her bones. Her eyes fluttered open to darkness, the world tilting violently beneath her. She gasped, her fingers scrabbling at the edge of a narrow bunk as the ship groaned around her, its timbers protesting like the bones of some ancient beast. Moonlight sliced through a cracked porthole, casting fractured silver light over the cabin. The air reeked of salt and rust, undercut by a darker, metallic tang that made her stomach churn. Blood?
She lay still, disoriented, her skull throbbing. Fragments of memory surfaced: rain-soaked earth, the hollow thud of dirt hitting her grandmother's casket, the scent of lilies wilting in the November chill. But how had she gone from that graveside to this… this place? Her hands trembled as she patted her pockets, finding her smartphone. The screen was cracked, a spiderweb of fractures radiating from the corner, but the flashlight still worked. She tapped it, and a weak beam cut through the gloom.
The cabin was small, its walls panelled in mahogany gone grey with age. A tarnished brass lamp swung from the ceiling; its glass shattered. Lily's breath fogged the air as she sat up, her stiff dress crackling with dried salt. Around her neck hung a locket she didn't recognize—a tarnished oval on a delicate chain, its surface etched with a crest she couldn't decipher. She pried it open with numb fingers. Inside, a faded photograph: a woman in a high-collared 19th-century gown stood on a rain-slick dock, her hand resting on the hull of a ship named Midnight Star. The woman's face was her own.
"Impossible," Lily whispered. Her voice sounded alien; her throat raw as if she'd been screaming.
The ship lurched, and she stumbled to the door. The corridor beyond stretched into darkness, lined with doors that hung askew on corroded hinges. Brass sconces dotted the walls, their candles long extinguished, wax pooled like molten ghosts. The floorboards creaked beneath her feet, each groan echoing through the silence. No engine hummed. No voices called out. Only the relentless drip-drip-drip of water and the distant crash of waves.
A draft kissed her neck—cold, purposeful. It carried a whisper: "Find the truth."
Lily froze. The voice was her grandmother's, but younger, strained with fear.
She followed the cold air to a stairwell, its railing feathered with frost. Her phone's light trembled over the steps as she climbed, the cold intensifying until her joints ached. At the top, a heavy door resisted her push before yielding with a scream of rusted metal.
Fog swallowed her whole. It clung to her skin, thick and greasy, reducing the world to a smothering grey void. Somewhere in the mist, a woman's voice sang—a French lullaby Élodie had hummed to her as a child, its melody fraying at the edges.
"Dors, dors, petit navire…"
"La mer te prendra sans dire…"
Lily's breath hitched. Élodie had always stopped there, refusing to sing the verse about the sea claiming the ship.
The singing grew louder, pulling her toward the stern. Her shoes slipped on dew-slick planks as the fog thinned just enough to reveal a figure at the rail—a woman in a waterlogged evening gown, her back to Lily, hair streaming like kelp.
"Hello?" The word barely escaped Lily's frozen lips.
The singing stopped.
The woman turned slowly.
Lily's heart stalled.
It was Élodie.
But not the grandmother she'd buried three days prior. This Élodie was young, her face bloated and pallid, seaweed tangled in her chestnut hair. Her eyes were voids of obsidian, leaking saltwater that dripped from her jaw onto the deck.
"You shouldn't have come back," the spectre rasped, her voice the hiss of waves on sand.
Lily stumbled backward, the ship's horn blaring sudden and deafening. When she blinked, the figure was gone. Her hip struck the rail, and her fingers brushed something carved into the wood—tally marks, fresh and glistening with sap. She squinted. Names accompanied each mark:
ALOÏS MARCHAND – 1789
CÉCILE MARCHAND – 1832
HENRI MARCHAND – 1916
ÉLODIE MARCHAND – 1983
The most recent cut wept amber, as if the ship itself bled.
Lily's fingers lingered on the sap-oozing tally mark bearing Élodie's name. The fog thinned momentarily, revealing a staircase descending into the ship's belly. The whispers surged, colder now, urgent:
"Find the truth. Break the cycle."
Her breath hitched. The locket at her throat pulsed faintly, its metal warming against her skin as if urging her forward. Below, darkness yawned—a mouth hungry for secrets.
She descended.