The old fisherman said, “The ocean’s too quiet,” and I knew he didn’t mean calm. He said it the way you talk about a winch that slips once and then pretends it didn’t.
Nets came up intact and empty. Not torn, not fouled—just empty, as though we’d lowered them into a medium that didn’t recognize nets. The gulls circled and kept their mouths shut.
I’ve seen flat seas, and I’ve seen seas that want to kill you. This one looked settled. Like it had made up its mind.
I checked my compass because that’s the kind of fact you can argue with. North sat still, then drifted a few degrees, then sat still again. I turned the housing, breathed on the glass, waited. I tapped it—twice—too hard the second time. The needle didn’t care.
The fisherman watched me, not unkindly. Just… finished with hope.
I put the compass away and took it back out five minutes later. Like catching it misbehaving would help. It didn’t.
By afternoon, the water looked thick. It swallowed glare instead of throwing it back. Reflections died early. Even the sky looked duller where it met the sea.
Sound carried wrong. Oars entered the surface with a soft, incomplete slap, like a muffled hand on wet cloth. Each stroke felt like an interruption.
I’d been sent out for a small chart problem—one of those tidy jobs. Confirm the discrepancy, write the note, go home. By dusk, the job felt like a joke with the punchline missing.
The air pressed down with a steady weight. No wind, but pressure. My ears clicked once, the way they do in a lift, and then nothing changed. That bothered me more than if they’d kept clicking.
I tied down my instruments twice. Then I sat with them and waited for the world to do something normal.
Nothing did. The quiet just stayed.
The second night didn’t help. The stars were all there, bright and sharp, but the arrangement felt wrong for the season. Not wrong like a mistake. Wrong like a picture hung straight on the wrong wall.
I traced the constellations anyway. It’s what you do when you can’t fix the thing itself—you rehearse the names. It didn’t put anything back.
Sleep came in short blocks. Every time I dropped off, I ended up in the same place: heavy stone corridors bending inward without meeting. The masonry looked careful, like someone had taken their time and disliked you.
There was no center. No turn that brought relief. Just enclosure.
A sound moved through it—necessary, automatic—like breath in an empty corridor: present, obedient, not meant for me. I woke with my jaw clenched and my tongue stuck to my teeth.
Before dawn, the air smelled like salt plus copper. The tide hadn’t come in or gone out. It just held.
I wrote down times and levels, then crossed them out. The numbers wouldn’t reconcile with the sea. I tried a different pencil, as if graphite had opinions.
At dawn, an island stood where none had been marked. It didn’t rise out of fog. It wasn’t emerging. It was simply there, like someone had added it when you weren’t looking.
It rose in terraces and angles that refused the eye’s usual bargains.
The steps repeated at the wrong ratios. From the boat, they looked regular; up close, they didn’t shrink with perspective the way stairs are supposed to. The rock face held its own scale, indifferent to where I stood, like it was measuring me instead.
The sea around it was smooth to the point of insult. Water didn’t lap at the stone. It stopped.
Nothing lived on it. No birds landed. No insects crossed the air.
I waited longer than I should have. Then I took the dinghy in. Staying offshore had started to feel like a choice I’d have to explain later.
The stone underfoot was dry in a way that didn’t match the weather. My steps sounded wrong—too small, too absorbed—cut off before they could finish. Halfway up, I realized my left hand was clenched hard enough to ache. I opened it. It closed again on its own.
I climbed without hurry. Speed felt stupid here.
Each terrace took my weight and gave nothing back. No grit. No ring. The sole of my boot might as well have been stepping on thick felt.
At the summit, a seam in the rock had opened. No hinges, no frame—just a clean division that was an entrance. That’s the only word that fits, even though it shouldn’t.
I stood with my hand on the edge of it and tried to list reasons to turn back. I had plenty of reasons. None of them felt usable.
I started to step back, then didn’t. That’s the part that still embarrasses me.
Inside, it didn’t wake. It noticed.
The name came anyway—Cthulhu—because my mind likes labels when it’s scared. I hated that it arrived dressed in story. I tried “the thing.” I tried “it.” I tried not naming it at all. None of those held.
What followed wasn’t drama. It was registration—magnitude, not menace; comprehension without concern.
The way a ledger includes you and moves on. I tried to think “important,” and the word slipped free.
My thoughts thinned to scraps—accurate, useless—and fear stopped doing its normal job, the one built for sharks and knives and drowning. I remember, absurdly, worrying about my boots on the stone, as if manners mattered.
Then it ended like a pressure change in the inner ear. Sudden relief, followed by the suspicion you’d been wrong about what hurt.
I was outside again. Stone was stone. Sea was sea. I hated that my mind said it like a prayer.
The seam was gone, or else I couldn’t locate it with my eyes. Those are different statements. I don’t know which is true.
Wind returned. Small waves resumed their old labor.
The island sank without drama. Water covered it the way tide covers footprints—patient, thorough, final.
I was found days later with dry charts and wet hands. Alive, in the narrowest sense that mattered to them.
That night, I tried to write my report. I sharpened two pencils down to stubs before admitting that language was misbehaving. Sentences closed too early or ran on past their own meaning. I wrote the compass reading three times, crossed it out, and stopped.
I stopped there—not because I was finished, but because the words stopped obeying.
