Hello and welcome back to Kindling! If you’re new, welcome, and thank you for subscribing! Your support means the world. If you’ve been around a while, you’ll know that this is my first story since late March, when I promised you this collection. I have had a lot of you reach out to me privately, and I want to express how grateful I am to all of my readers. Thank you for being here. Thank you for reaching out. Thank you for reading.
Today’s story is, “Siren Stars,” the beginning of Kindling’s first ever short story collection, Lights Out. Inspired by folk horror and mythology, this collection of short stories will explore the unknown, the consequences of touching the forbidden, and the mysteries that lurk in the dark, unexplored places of the world.
Inspired by my early exposure to horror, dark sci-fi and dark fantasy through anthologies and collections such as, Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, The Illustrated Man, The Twilight Zone, and Tales From the Crypt.
She awoke to blackness, her skin slick with sweat. She didn’t know where she was, only that it was night and she was not in her own bed. The evening came rushing back to her. They had packed their suitcases and cleaned out the fridge, found plastic bags to wrap seashells and pieces of black volcanic rock. Then an early bedtime, preparation before the eight hour flight back home.
Her phone lit up on the bedside table, the ceiling glowing for a minute, then dimming. She picked it up, and through squinted eyes saw that it was still night, only a little past ten. The heat was unbearable. She had barely slept in the last week. The condo had been cheap for a reason. There was no air conditioning, no ceiling fans. Only a little electric one she plugged in and kept in the kids room. The last thing she needed was to have them awake too.
She threw off a thin sheet and went to the kitchen. She drank down two glasses of water despite the mineral taste. She couldn’t wait to get back home. Everyone wanted ocean and island, but she had made up her mind as soon as she landed that if she survived the plane ride, she was never coming back. What anyone saw in that stretch of blue concrete below she would never understand. When she sat on her beach chair and watched the water, even at sunset, all she could think of was death.
“How many ships are buried under here?” she asked Aaron, and he had smiled and taken a swig of his third beer and counting.
“What kinda question is that hun? Just enjoy yourself. Look at the kids.”
She had been trying not to look. Every time she watched them playing, the waves creeping and building behind them, she could feel the muscles in her neck tighten and flex.
“Careful!” she yelled as Walker waved to her and Macy jumped up and down smiling.
“What are you so worried about?”
She could feel her brow furrowing and relaxed her face. The crease between her eyes was becoming permanent. Most nights, after the family had gone to bed, she spent time preening herself, always ending with her pulling at the skin there, willing time travel.
“Nothing,” she said, and looked back at her book, a romance novel she had picked up in the airport.
She let her eyes glide over the letters, but the words never landed. Instead, her mind was filled with images of dark ocean and crashing waves.
Her head was pounding as she went up the stairs to the kids’ room, a little loft with two twin beds catty corner from one another. The tide was in, the ocean crashing heavily against the cliffs below their ocean-view condo. The window was open. She had forgotten to shut it, and even though it was unlikely, Walker could fall out of it if he laid against the heavy screen just right.
He was getting bigger, almost ten, and at the age when he was losing his little boy face and getting plump before the inevitable growth spurt that would come with puberty. When she reached the top of the stairs she could see his bed, a lump of covers where he lay. The window was open, and a breeze blew in off the ocean, salty and only a little cooler than the wet air.
She licked her lips and tasted sweat. She couldn’t wait to be out of this place. In an airport with cool air conditioning blowing on her from vents twenty feet up. Then the uncomfortable airplane seats, the lines to gather baggage littered with sand and seashells. And finally, home.
There was only one way to get to the window. She would have to lean over, maybe even place a knee on the mattress. She moved gingerly, like she used to when he was a baby and she would creep out of his room desperately wishing that he wouldn’t wake. As she placed her knee, carefully at first and then leaning her full weight, she felt it. The nothingness. The mattress gave easily.
She stood, the breath gone out of her, and reached for the covers. Her heart was pounding when she drew the blankets down and saw that Walker was not there. She felt her chest thud, her rib cage rattling, and she pulled at the sheets and pillows, ripping them from the mattress corners and throwing them aside.
He must have fallen.
The thought came slamming into her, immediately sure, and she laid across the bed where the boy’s body should have been, reaching for the screen. It was gone.
“Walker!” she shouted, eyes searching the stretch of lawn below.
But there was nothing there, only black grass and sky, and the sound of heavy waves crashing against the rocks below.
She was running, barefoot and panicked with nothing but a cellphone for light. Aaron was at the condo, still asleep. She had tried to shake him awake, and when it didn’t work, she resolved to call him while she searched.
“Walker!” she yelled as she came to a little path that led down to the rocky outcrop where the waves crashed.
It was rock littered and slick with sea spray and slimy plants that grew from tiny holes in the stones. She was glad she hadn’t put on shoes. With her bare skin, she could cling to the path. The rocks cut into her heels, but she wouldn’t slip.
“Walker!” she yelled again.
She could barely hear herself over the noise of the crashing, battering slams of ocean into land. She looked around desperately, but saw only the dark shape of jungle plants. Big leaves and ferns, and the tall tangled limbs of banyan trees, stretching up and away from the earth.
It was getting darker, the path enclosed and overgrown by swarming plants that stretched toward the ocean. The poisonous saltwater fed their green limbs. She felt them wrap around her ankles, even the tiniest vines strong, rooted in the ruinous black soil. Nothing should grow here, and yet it did.
Tears were springing, the sound of her breathing drowned out by maniacal ocean waves. She shined her phone flashlight, hoping for the unmistakable red cotton pajama shirt, a shimmer of his dark hair and pale face against that forest abyss. Nothing.
She kept on, walking down the rotting wooden stairs, overrun with mud and sand. The bottom step, clear just a week ago when they had wandered down in the early morning low tide, was covered in water. She stopped and watched as it ebbed and flowed, pouring in, and then pulling out again. Beyond that, visible beneath a canopy of hanging branches and leaves, the ocean.
The waves had slowed, and she wondered if the tide was moving out, pulling back and taking her son with it to sink below and lie forever with the ruins of ships and snorkelers, sailors and fishermen. The whole place stunk of rotting plants, the expanse of black water a living grave. It moved seductively, inviting her in, slowing at her approach. She could feel the life in it then.
(they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song)
The thought was not her own. She knew that. It had come from the water. She looked out, pain in her tightening chest at the certainty that Walker was gone, sacrificed to some old sea god she didn’t know the name of. Had she, she may have bargained with it.
(there is power in the name)
The line set her teeth on edge, a prickle tightened the skin along her spine. She was so overwhelmed with the shock of fresh grief and fear at the thoughts imparted by seawater, that she didn’t hear the soft lapping of the wooden paddle against the diminishing waves.
She saw it before she heard it. The underside of the driftwood canoe glowed eerily, lit up by some bioluminescent creature as it moved almost silently through the water.
“Who is it?” she asked, squinting her eyes to try and see who (or what) was approaching her.
The smell of seaweed and hollow crab claws wafted on the soft warm breeze. It reminded her of fishing in Maine, that first summer with her father, spent vomiting over the side of the boat, her nostrils and hair always tinged with sea rot and green plants that felt like mucous. She held her breath to keep from being sick.
A break in the black, something yellow and glowing, a shooting star from the sea, rose up and hovered over the ocean, the waves calming before it. It was far, so far she couldn’t make out exactly what it was. A diver’s headlamp or a boat’s cabin lights. She thought this to herself, and the false words meant to bring comfort, landed like pebbles in her stomach.
The canoe bumped against the wood of the step, the bottom scraping ocean rocks beneath.
“They sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song,” the thing sung, the sound of the words like wind through cracks in the door.
Her arms pinched into goose flesh.
“Walker?” she managed to ask, and the thing nodded, fresh ocean mist backlit by the steady sea star beyond.
She looked at it, amazed and horrified by its beauty in the blackness.
Don’t go—she felt that primal warning, but it was not strong enough to override a sickly sweet curiosity.
“Where do they have him?”
“Below.”
The thing was cloaked in seaweed. She could see that now. Little objects were tangled there. Trinkets and seashells, the remains of dead crabs and fish skeletons. Its face was shrouded in darkness, its head covered in a hood. She tried to shine her phone light in its direction, but the light disappeared except at the edges of the creature, as if it had been pulled into the blackness where a face should be.
It waited, the wood of the canoe knocking against the steps with each gentle wave. She looked at the star, and thought of her little boy. Somewhere out here in the darkness (below), he was waiting for her.
The sea was calm now, the tide moving back from the rocky shore she had come from. The creature paddled softly, its movements strong and steady, in time with the ocean as if it were one with the ebb and flow. From what she could see, there was no face. Even when her phone’s flashlight had flitted across where eyes and a mouth should have been, there was only black.
She looked out at the expanse of water, the little lights of houses and condos, like tiny candles, easily snuffed out with a breath. Her own breathing was ragged, barely controlled. The water was shifting around her, the only light from her phone swallowed up in ocean. She turned it off, and looked in the direction of their destination, a glowing orb floating impossibly in the endless night.
Her breathing calmed a little. The light put a warmth in her chest that drove fear away. She stared at it, determined not to look to the right or the left. Walker’s face grew distant in her mind, pushed below conscious thought into dark waters by burgeoning light.
Only when they were close enough that the light illuminated the depths of ocean, did she look down into the water, and see Walker below. His skin was pale, bluish, but he smiled up at her from twenty or thirty feet below.
“Walker,” she whispered, and the creature responded.
“Below.”
Its breath was cool, like air from a sea mist. Barnacles and seashells, and dead things at the bottom of the ocean floated in her mind.
“Walker!” she screamed it now. “Walker! Walker!”
Her hands were outstretched to him. He shook his head, a mischievous no on his lips. A bubble floated to the surface. She stood, breathing hard, all the fear back now that her eyes were off that mysterious light. She had always hated deep water. Even the deep end of the pool could set her heart fluttering, her legs kicking for the surface, the noise of screaming kids and lifeguard whistles a welcome thing compared to the dead, muffled quiet underwater.
She closed her eyes, pointed her hands into a dive, and jumped. The water was surprisingly warm, the light of the strange star giving vision to things she had never seen before. Little silver fish flipped their tails, swimming away from her as she pushed down, farther and farther, towards her little boy.
The weight of the ocean was growing with each fluttering kick down, the water trying to lift her up and out, like a white blood cell attacking a virus. Somehow, Walker seemed to be drifting further down, where the water grew deep blue. She kicked harder, knowing she might have 30 seconds before she would have to turn and break for the surface.
His lips were purple, his eyes, strange and black in the illusory light. For the first time, she thought, how is he alive? The revelation came with a new fear, and the Walker thing below seemed to recognize it. It smiled, revealing pointed teeth. It opened its mouth to stick out its tongue. Instead of the soft pink squish he was always getting in trouble for using on his sister, a tangle of black seaweed escaped.
She turned to swim up, her heart throbbing, lungs aching for oxygen. The light was pulling away, dark water closing in around her. The comfort of that warm glow had turned acidic green, sickly. When she broke the surface, the light was high in the sky. The canoe and its strange master had disappeared.
“Help!” she screamed to the darkness. Not even the lights of the shoreline were visible from where she was. The current was pulling her out to sea, further into an expanse that went on for miles. The night sky with its stars, the only break in the black. She pulled her phone from her pocket, the thing sopping wet with salt water.
“Come on, come on,” she said through chattering teeth, and turned the thing on. To her surprise, it worked. She made her way to the flashlight, and clicked it on, shining it around, desperate to see anything. But nothing was there. Only her, and the Walker thing.
Below.
The man woke up as if from a nightmare, something awful he already couldn’t remember. His wife rolled over, awake too.
“What is it?”
“A dream,” he breathed out. “Just a dream.”
The ocean crashed outside the window.
“Don’t you love that sound?” she asked.
Usually he did, but just now, stricken by the feelings leftover from his nightmare, he didn’t. He was sweating, and went to the open window to feel the breeze against his goose pimpled flesh.
“What is that?”
She propped herself up on an elbow and looked out at the black ocean beyond. A tiny beautiful light, far in deep ocean, was glowing.
“Maybe a fishing boat?” she ventured.
They watched as it dipped below the water’s surface, then rose again.
“Maybe night divers. We should sign up for the tour.”
He watched as the little white light disappeared, and remembered a night from his childhood when his family had gathered at midnight to watch a meteor shower. Those little stars, impossible and mesmerizing. You wanted to follow them up there, to ride one across the endless black, to find its resting place after it had crashed to the earth.
The man was overcome by nostalgia, and stayed at the window as the light dipped below the water’s surface one last time, and then, burned out.
Super creepy, Shaina. I enjoyed the story very much. You really hate the beach don’t you? 🏖️
Oh boy Shaina, that is good! Welcome back! You managed to stretch a thin strand of hope to a breaking point, all the way to the last paragraph. This in spite of my rational mind telling me there was no hope, for the horror beast doesn't allow it...