Story 18: The Ghost of the Seas - A bone-chilling horror story - Episode 1 of 2

Music Hello everyone and welcome back to Kahanee Suno with Kabir and Chara. I am Kabir, your host and as always thank you for being here. Seriously every time I record I think about you, the person on the other end. Earphones in, wherever you are in the world and it makes this whole thing feel worth it. Before I start tonight I have to talk about Sara for a second. Last week she brought us the third musketeer, a story about three women and a friendship so deep, so layered, so honestly told. The way Sara narrated that, the warmth she carried through every line. I don't say this lightly, it was some of the finest storytelling we've had on this podcast. Sara, you made those three women completely real. I could feel them. Thank you for that. And thank you also for the generous heartfelt thing you said about my last story. One last try before I die. Coming from you, that meant a lot to me. Thank you Sara for that as well. So folks out there, tonight it's my turn again and I have to be upfront with you. What I'm bringing you tonight is a two part story. I'm splitting it across two episodes because I want to give it the space it deserves. Each part will stand on its own but together I think you'll feel the full weight of what this story is really about. Tonight is part one. The story is called Ghost of the Seas. It's a horror story but not the kind you're expecting. There is no haunted house, no cursed object, no spirit with grudge. What I am bringing you tonight is something I believe is far more unsettling and far more beautiful than any of that. Picture, if you will, an evening on the southwestern coast of India. The state of Kerala, a long lush strip of land where the Arabian Sea has been eating at the shore of thousands of years. Where the air always smells of salt and rain and coconut oil. Where the fishing boats come in before dusk and the men haul their nets up the beach with hands that are rough as old a road. The town we are visiting had no grand name. It is one of hundreds of small coastal towns or perhaps ten thousand people, perhaps a few more, strung light beats along this shore. It is the kind of town where the roads are narrow and the walls are painted in fading yellows and greens. Where everybody knows everybody else's grandmother. Most of the families here have been fishermen for five generations, maybe more. The sea is not a mystery to them. It's a workplace, a livelihood, a way of life. So old it has become the texture of life itself. On this particular evening, the sky is turning grey. The clouds have been building all afternoon, stacking themselves above the horizon like grey woolly. And now the air has taken on that thick electric quality that anyone who knew, who grew up near the sea, will recognize immediately. The feeling that something is about to break open. The street lights flicker. The palm trees shift nervously. Rain is coming. And at the edge of town where the land gives way to sand and the sand gives way to sea, there is a house. It is not a remarkable house. Two stories. White-washed walls, a small garden behind a boundary wall. The gate that doesn't quite latch properly. It sits close enough to the water that when the tide is high, the family inside can hear it. That steady, patient breathing of the ocean at night. In that house lives Kumar's family. Father Naveen Kumar, 43-year-old, an accountant who grew up in this very town, and came back to it after his studies because he could never quietly calm, practical, the kind of man who believes in what he can see and touch and verify. Mother Arunakumari, a school teacher, thoughtful and warm with a sort of steady patience that comes from spending your days with children. She is the kind of woman who notices things. The shift in someone's expression, the sound in child's voice that says something is not quite right. Son, Varun Kumar, 16-year-old, long-limbed and restless, always on his phone, always with his earbuds in. He is at that age where the world seems both enormous and slightly dull and he hasn't yet found the thing that will set him on fire. And then there is the youngest, Nina. Nina is 12-year-old. She is bright, genuinely, quietly brilliant in the way that some children are. The kind of brightness that teachers notice and parents worry about because they wonder if the world will be able to hold it. She loves books. She loves the scene. She loves to draw. But Nina has a problem. She cannot sleep. Not in somnia exactly. She falls asleep but the sleep is wrong. It is restless and shallow. Full of dreams that she cannot describe properly when she wakes. Only that they leave her feeling as though she has been somewhere she does not recognize. Somewhere that smells different. Sounds different. Feels different from everything she knows. Her parents have taken her to doctors in the city. The diagnosis is a sleeping disorder. Something in the brain's rhythms that disrupts the natural cycles of rest. It is manageable. The doctors say she will likely grow out of it. But for now it means that Nina is always a little tired, always a little pale, always a little somewhere else even when she is right in front of you. On this grey electric evening, Nina is in her room on the ground floor sitting cross-legged on her bed with a candle beside her because as predicted the power has gone off. And her text books open in front of her. The candles throw soft jumping light. The window to her left is dark. The glass slightly misted with humidity. Nina is trying to read. She is not succeeding. She keeps glancing at the window. Later she would struggle to explain what it was that made her look. It wasn't a sound. It wasn't a reflection or a flicker of light. It was something more instinctive than that. The ancient animal awareness that something nearby is watching you. The hairs on the back of your neck standing up before your brain has registered. Why? Nina looked at the window and the eyes looked back. They were outside the glass just there, just at the level of the sill. As though whatever they belonged to was standing just outside and they were extraordinary. Not frightening, not at first. Just extraordinary. Large, clear, often almost impossible clarity like light through deep water. The kind of light you see if you have ever gone swimming in the ocean and opened your eyes underwater and looked upward towards the surface. They blinked and Nina screamed. She ran down to the hallway, her barefoot slapping on the cool tile into the main room where her parents were sitting in the candlelight. Her mother mending something, her father reading by torchlight. There's a face. She said. Outside my window. There's a face looking in. Now, we looked at her steadily. He loved her daughter deeply, but he was a practical man. He thought of sleeping disorder. He thought of candlelight, which plays tricks. He thought of many ways. A tired, imaginative, well-year-old might misread a shadow. But he said none of this allowed. He got up, picked up his torch and went to look. He checked the window from inside, then went out through the back door, opened the gate and walked around the outside of the house. The boundary wall was about five feet high, just outside it. A narrow road ran alongside the property. Beyond that, the beach and then the sea, which was darker than usual tonight. The waves a little higher. There was no one there. No footprints in the soft ground beneath the window. No shadow crouching behind the wall. No sign that any living person had been standing there, looking in. He came back inside and asked Nina what exactly she had seen. She took a breath. Tired to be precise, she said, I couldn't really see the face properly. It was dark, but the eyes. I could see the eyes very clearly. They were very big, very bright. They were just looking at me, not trying to scare me, just looking as if they wanted to see me. Like a person, her father asked. She thought about it. Yes, and also, not exactly like a person. Navin patted her hand, said it was the light, the darkness, the tiredness. Said she should sleep. Said everything was fine. Nina did not argue, but she did not quite believe him. Days passed, a week. Life continued in its ordinary way. School, work, meals. The evening news, the sound of the sea, the power cut became a distant memory. Nina did not see the eyes again. And slowly, the incident settled into the back of family's mind. The way strange things do when the ordinary world asserts itself. Varun had been particularly dismissive. You were half asleep, he told his little sister. You imagined it. He said this with the easy certainty of 16-year-old who has not yet had the world confuse him. Then, one evening, two weeks after Nina's encounter, Varun was in his room, upstairs. The power was on, his phone was probed against his pillow. Playing something, he was stretched out on his bed. Only half-watching, the kind of absent attention the teenagers specializing. The window on his right was dark, the curtain was not fully drawn. He saw movement. Not in the phone, not in the room, something at the edge of his vision. In the cab between the curtain and the window frame, he turned his head, irritated. Expecting a moth or a reflection, the eyes were there. Again, the same eyes his sister had described. Though he hadn't truly let himself imagine them until now. Large, heart-breakingly clear, glowing with a quality that was not quite light, but was somehow luminous, as though they were lit from within. They were looking directly at him. The moment stretched. Then, Varun did what 16-year-old boys do when they are terrified and cannot admit it. He yelled. He was down the stairs before he quite knew he was moving, breathless, his phone still in his hand and the story poured out of him in a tumble. The window, the eyes, the exact quality of them, the way they looked at him, not with the menace, but with a sort of impossible attention. He stopped mid-sentence when he saw Nina's face. His sister was looking at him with an expression he recognized, because he hadn't worn it himself two weeks ago when he had dismissed her account. It was the expression of someone hearing their own experience described back to them precisely, down to the last detail. Now he went upstairs and checked. He switched on every light. He went outside again. This time, with a brighter torch, he scanned the wall, the road, the beach. Nothing, not a trace. He came back inside and sat down at the kitchen table. For the first time, the practical accountant from Trissur felt the cold fingers of something he could not categorize. Both of you have seen the same thing. He said slowly, exactly the same thing. Aruna said, so what do we do? Nobody had an answer. They began sleeping in the same room. It was Aruna's suggestion and nobody objected. They moved the children's mattresses in and arranged them on the floor beside the parents' bed. And every night, the four of them wanted to sleep together the way they hadn't since the children were very small. They didn't tell anyone how could they. The town already knew about Nina's sleeping disorder. Say one word about Ice and the window and every auntie and uncle and grandfather in the community would say, ah, yes, poor Nina. She's been having these episodes and now the boy is doing it too. It must be something in the house, in the air, in the water, or perhaps it's stress. They would be kind and they would be wrong and they would make everything harder. So the Kumar's kept their secret and slept in the room in the big bedroom and for two more weeks, nothing happened. Then came the night that changed things. It was close to midnight. The town was quiet. Even the sea sounded quieter than usual. As though it too had fallen into a shallow sleep. Naveen was deeply asleep. The children were in the middle, arms and legs tangled in the unselfconscious way of children. Aruna was on the outer edge of the bed, facing away from the others. She drifted to the surface of sleep, the way you do sometimes without knowing why some subtle wrongness pulling you back toward consciousness. She opened her eyes two feet away, directly in front of her face were the eyes. They were enormous at this distance, more extraordinary than children had described. Because no description could quite capture the way they seemed to contain something. Depth, thought, presence. They were the eyes of something that was looking at her with the full force of its attention. Not aggression, not hunger, something else, something like recognition. Aruna did not scream, not immediately. Later she would say that she didn't scream because she was in a state of complete paralysis. Not of her body, but of her mind. Her mind had simply stopped the way that a clock stops when you take the battery out. Then her mind started again and the first thing it produced which surprised even her was not a scream, but a question. Who are you? She said, why are you here? The eyes blinked and then perhaps before she spoke perhaps because she asked rather than ran something changed in that gaze. The hardness if there had been any dissolved. What remained was something so nakedly sorrowful and urgent that it was Aruna's heart, not her fear that broke first. And then she screamed. Navinvoke, childrenvoke, the eyes disappeared, not with drama, not with a bang or a flash, but in the way that a candle flame goes out. Here one moment and not the next. The four Kumar's sat in their bed in the dark listening to each other breathe. This is enough. Navin said at last we are going to the community hall on Saturday. The community hall was a large open-sided building near the center of town with concrete floors and ceiling fans and long wooden benches, worn smooth by decades of sitting. Every Saturday evening the townspeople gathered there to discuss whatever needed discussing. Disputes about land, plans for the festivals, problems with water supply. The Kumar's arrived early and sat together near the front. Navin had spent the whole day rehearsing what he would say, trying to find the version of the story that sounded at least like something from a film and most like a report, a factual account, a thing that had happened to a sensible family. He stood up and told it from beginning to end. Nina, citing at the window, once encountered two weeks later with details that matched his sisters exactly and then Aruna in their room, in the dark, two feet away. He spoke clearly and he spoke carefully. The hall received it in silence. That came the responses he had expected. Gentle, kind, rational, the sleeping disorder, Nina's condition was well known. Perhaps the stress was contagious, they suggested. Perhaps the mind under pressure produces these experiences. Varun was a teenager. After all, teenagers are suggestible and Aruna had been sleeping lightly, worried about her daughter. Navin listened to all of this patiently. Then he said, three people, three different types, three different windows, identical description, the same eyes described independently, without comparison. One of them, my son had explicitly told my daughter she was imagining things and then he saw exactly what she described, a silence. And then from the back of the room, a hand went up. An older man who lived alone in a house on the other side of the lane. He had always been a quiet presence in the community. Atended the Saturday meetings, greeted his neighbors, asked for nothing. His name was Rajan. I have seen it too, he said, twice. I thought it was once or twice for only me. And not a big thing. I did not want to trouble anyone. The hall went quiet. He described it, large eyes, luminous, not frightening, not exactly, but deeply unsettling in their stillness, their completeness, a face that was present but not fully present. The hall began to murmur. And then a second person spoke and a third, and slowly, like tributaries joining a river, other accounts came in from around the room, hesitant, embarrassed, but real. An elderly woman who had seen through her kitchen window three weeks ago. A fisherman who had seen it at the waterline one night when he had gone out late to check his nets. A young mother who had seen it in the garden through the glass of her back door while she was warming milk for her baby. Everyone had thought they were alone. Everyone had told themselves it was nothing. A trick of light, a stray animal, an overreactive imagination. Everyone had seen the same eyes. The community hall was not laughing now. It was at this meeting that Vijay spoke up. He was 24 years old. The kind of young man towns like this produce occasionally. Restless, curious, too smart for what was available locally but not yet sure what to do about it. He had studied biology for two years at college before money ran out and he had come back home to help his parents run their small hardware shop. He spent his evenings reading whatever he could find. He said, I will go and stay there. In the house, I will try to see it. Several people told him this was unnecessary, possibly dangerous and definitely a waste of time. Vijay said, Look, either there is something there in which case someone needs to actually look at it closely instead of running away. Or there isn't. In which case I'll sleep well and the whole thing will be resolved. Either way we will know more than we do now. There was no strong argument against this. The Kumar's agreed to give Vijay the upstairs guest room for as long as he needed. For three nights, nothing happened. Vijay read by torchlight and drank tea and slept reasonably well. Though he kept one eye pointed at the window while began to feel like a habit. On the fourth night, he woke up at two in the morning. The room was dark. The window was dark and there at the glass were the eyes. They were looking at him with what he could only later describe as anger. Not the anger of aggression, not the face of something that wants to hurt you, the anger of frustration. Of something that has been trying and trying to communicate and is not being heard. Vijay forced himself to stay still. He was frightened. He would say so plainly when he reported back. He was very frightened. But he looked at the eyes and said, Who are you? Why are you troubling the people of this village? Something shifted. The anger in those eyes, the hot, frustrated, desperate anger cooled like water poured on embers. What replaced it was something exhausted. Something that had been trying for a very long time and was tired. The eyes closed and the presence was gone. Vijay stayed. He told the community what had happened and said he wasn't finished. There was something deliberate about those eyes. He said something intentional, whatever it was, it kept coming back. It kept trying. There was a reason for that and he wanted to find out what it was. He stayed another week in the guest room. The second appearance came on a Saturday just past midnight. This time the eyes at the window carried a different quality. Quieter, more patient. As though whatever owned them had decided to try a different approach. Vijay stood at the window, looked at them. They looked back. He noticed this time how they blinked, slowly, with the rhythm of something in water. Something that moves differently from things that live in air. He noticed the extraordinary clarity of the iris. The way the light within them seemed self-generated rather than reflected. He reached for the glass of water on the bedside table. He threw it at the window. The eyes vanished. But not like they'd been startled or frightened. They vanished like something that had decided calmly to leave. And in silence that followed, Vijay had the distinct and inexplicable feeling that he had just done something rude. For two days, nothing appeared. On the third day, the eyes returned. They were angry again, not with the hot frustration of before, but with a cold, precise disappointment. The kind of look a teacher gives a student who has done something beneath them. Vijay understood in that moment that the water had been wrong. That whatever this thing was, it had trusted him with the moment of contact and he had responded by throwing something at it. I am sorry, he said aloud to the eyes at the glass. I shouldn't have done that. I was trying to understand. I was testing you. The cold look held for a moment longer. Then it softened. Vijay moved toward the window slowly. The way you move toward an animal you don't wish to frighten. He got close. He pressed his hand against the glass. The eyes were right there, inches away on the other side. They looked at each other. He would try many times to describe what happened next. He never quite found the words, but this is the closest he came. It was as though a door opened, not a physical door, not even exactly a door, more like a membrane dissolved between his mind and something else's, between his experience and something far older and deeper than his experience. He felt a pulling sensation, a sudden, retiginous falling forward and then water, all around him, water. Not the gentle water of the shallows, not the familiar water of the sea. Of the sea he had grown up beside. This was deep water, cold water, water that had never seen the sun, that had never felt a human hand, or the hull of a fishing boat, or the anchor chain scraping the bottom. This was the water of the abyss. The vast and lightless deeps where pressure is so great that everything that lives there has evolved for it, has been shaped by it, has been made strange by it. He was somewhere very far down and then rising toward him or he toward it, he couldn't tell the direction, he saw the wave. It was not yet a wave on the surface. Down here it was a movement, a slow, enormous, impossible displacement of water, a shudder traveling through the deep like a thought through a vast mind. He could feel the scale of it, he could feel what it would become when it reached the surface. When all that energy accumulated over thousands of meters of depth, came rising, compressing until it hit shallow water and reared up into something that could un-make a coastline. He saw it with absolute clarity, he felt it coming and then the connection broke. Snapped, like a thread pulled too tight and Vijay was on his knees on the floor of the guest room in the Kumar's house, breathing hard, sweat cold on his face, the room dark and solid and entirely itself around him. He stayed on the floor for a long time and there right there we pause, Vijay is on his knees on the floor of that upstairs room. The connection is broken, the vision is gone, but what he saw, that enormous, slow, impossible movement in the deep water that is not gone, that is still sitting in his chest, heavy and comb and very, very real. He doesn't know what it means yet, neither do you and that my friends is exactly where I want to leave you tonight. Part 1 of Ghost of the Seas ends here, the eyes have been seen, the vision has been felt, but the meaning of it all, who this cruddy is, what it came to say and what happens to this little coastal town on the edge of the Arabian scene. That is part 2 and I promise you, part 2 is where everything changes, come back for it, tell a friend to start from part 1 and while you wait, maybe don't stand too close to dark windows at night, just a thought. This has been Ghost of the Seas, part 1, the eyes, an original story written and narrated by me, Kabir, exclusively for Kahani Shanno with Kabir and Sara. All rights reserved. Thank you for listening, thank you for trusting us with your time. I am Kabir, good night. Ghost of the Seas