Part I

An Unexpected Invitation

There are things in this world plain reason can't survive looking at straight on. Most men who go looking for truth settle for religion, or worse, science, whichever fits better in a cigarette pack, to be taken out and shown to the unlucky few who haven't found their own salvation yet. But me? I'm just not sure anymore. I don't expect to be believed, and I stopped needing to be a while back. I need to write this down. To leave a mark. To prove that I existed.

It was early autumn of 2019, and I was working as a private investigator out of a small third-floor office on Burnside Street in Boston. I had been on the job a year, and work was scarce. I was hungry for any case that might land on my shabby, disorganized desk, which had, more than once, doubled as my pillow. I had been waking with an ache behind my knees, a small persistent complaint I blamed on sleeping at the desk.

Physically, I was not much to look at: a trench coat gone soft at the seams, a fedora pulled low enough to keep out the rain and other people's opinions, and oxfords resoled twice over. I kept a bottle of rye in the desk for the same reason I kept a Colt under my coat: some conversations only go one way, and it pays to be ready for either.

My office kept its own kind of company. Dust hung in the slatted light that fought through the blinds each morning, and the rye, three fingers lower than I cared to admit, shared a drawer with case files I had long since stopped alphabetizing. Below my window the city carried on its indifferent business: delivery bikes, an espresso machine on the corner, the pale blue glow of some stranger's phone reflected in the bakery glass. A tinny saxophone drifted from the little speaker on my filing cabinet, an old Coltrane side I had worn thin on vinyl. Behind my desk, the Sentina hung in a dark frame: a woman at a window with the sea behind her, still enough to make the water look painted.

In my line of work, everybody has something to hide. Love usually arrived already rotting. Money made gentle men dangerous, then taught the newspapers to call them pillars of the community. I had made my peace with that. It was easier than being surprised.

A manila envelope sat face down on the boards. Inside was a handwritten note dated October 13, 2019, a newspaper clipping of the same date, and a couple of photographs. The dates were ordinary. The feeling that they had been placed there for me was not. The year printed on the papers matched the year I carried in my head, though I could not have said when I had first learned it.

The letter read:

Two photographs were clipped to the letter. One showed Stephen, a young and not unattractive man of perhaps twenty-five, his hair cropped short, a smile that made his green eyes shine. The second showed a derelict factory sinking gradually into the marsh around it, an iron sign rusting on the crumbling brick: Monserta Glass. It was an unnerving sight, and it left me curious about how a young man like that had died in a place like that.

The newspaper article shed some light on how he had ended up in that place.

“A peculiar summary of the circumstances,” I thought, convinced Ms. Collins was right about how little the official story held together. I set the article down knowing I would not rest until I had spoken to this woman and learned what else she knew. I powered up my laptop and began my research, looking for anything that would give me an upper hand. The screen woke to a blue field of icons I recognized without recognizing the machine itself, a small piece of familiarity I filed under fatigue.

The factory belonged to an out-of-state property firm. Its website gave me a recorded message, then a man who answered in the careful language of somebody keeping his business photographed nowhere near the word tragedy.

Serwick itself offered less. A 1987 travel brochure gave the town two sentences and one photograph of the Marlin Inn, a three-story brick building with a sagging marquee.

The photograph was grainy and faded, but the building held my attention. I had the unpleasant sense that I was recognizing it rather than seeing it for the first time.

The only other useful source was a webpage about occult incidents and haunted places. Its anonymous author had lived in Serwick as a child and described the unrest of 1994: Mayor Ryan Kirk hearing the voice of God, ordering the removal of statues and mirrors, and finally refusing to leave his manor. The author's family left soon afterward.

It was enough to begin. I closed the browser and called Ms. Collins.

She answered on the second ring. Her voice was low and tired, but it sharpened when I gave my name. I heard a kettle click off somewhere behind her, followed by the small domestic silence of a person who had been waiting for someone to call. “Tell me everything you remember about your time with Stephen leading up to the incident,” I said. “And before you do, drink some water. You sound like you have not slept.” “Neither have you,” she said. She had a nurse's ear for that sort of thing, though I did not know enough about her yet to understand why.

She told me she worked nights at the university clinic, which explained the voice: low enough not to wake a room, firm enough to make a sick person obey it. Stephen used to call her the warden of basic needs. She said this with a small laugh that ended before it could become one.

When I asked whether he had been frightened before he left, she said Stephen never used that word. He called fear a complication, or a bad signal, or something he would deal with after breakfast. She had learned to listen for the word he substituted.

She told me Stephen had phoned her a week earlier, claiming a family emergency had arisen and he would be traveling to Boston for a few days. They had been dating for four months, and she had not yet met his family, so his solo trip was not a shock to her. What troubled her was the way he had said goodbye. He had asked whether she would still be awake when he called back, then made her promise to eat something before bed. It was the sort of ordinary concern that becomes unbearable once you know it was the last thing a person gave you. Sarah said she had started ending every call with the same three instructions: eat something, drink water, call me when you wake up. Stephen used to mock the list, then follow it in order. She could still remember the order even when she could no longer remember the last time he had called.

When I asked about communication during his absence, Sarah said they had spoken once and the conversation had been ordinary. Stephen had sounded tired, not frightened. The only other contact was a text message she received the night before his body was discovered. She believed it was gibberish. His phone was off, and his voice mailbox was full. “I kept calling anyway,” she said. “I know that is not useful information. I know what it sounds like. I just could not stop.”

She told me Stephen had a habit of making his messages sound lighter than he felt. If he was frightened, he sent a joke. If he was hurt, he sent a photograph of something ordinary. Once, she said, he had sent her a picture of Copper's old blanket from the foot of his bed with the caption: STILL HERE. She had thought he meant the dog.

When I asked what sort of jokes, she said the worse they were, the more frightened he had been. Once he had sent her a picture of a vending machine with the message: STILL WORKING. She had called him an idiot and stayed on the phone until he fell asleep.

At the time, Sarah had sent me the picture too, asking whether I thought the machine was a joke or a cry for help. I had answered: both. I had forgotten that until the elevator began asking its questions.

She was quiet for a moment. Then she told me she had learned the routine from hospital work: eat first, drink water before the shaking started, call again when the person was awake enough to answer. She said it as if the order itself could keep a body from leaving. Stephen had always laughed at it. He had also always done what she asked.

I wrote the three instructions in my notebook beneath the coordinates. They looked less like advice than a small emergency procedure. I did not know then how much of Sarah would survive as a procedure after the rest of her was gone.

Sarah had once told me that I treated sleep as an insult from a weaker man. She said it while taking the keyboard away from me and putting a glass of water in its place. I had laughed. She had not.

She knew I took coffee black and forgot to drink it. She used to put a fresh cup beside my hand without interrupting whatever I was building. I remembered the gesture more clearly than her face.

Curious about the significance of the message, I requested that she send me a copy to inspect its contents.

What follows is the message, exactly as it appeared on my phone's screen:

Eckth S'reh Ocxrel. S'reh Mhith Trient Sh'ten.

42.66, -70.75

“Gibberish,” I agreed. But my instincts told me it was unlikely to be an accident. I steered the conversation toward Stephen's past: his job, his education, anything that might explain why he had died in an abandoned factory far from his own front door.

Ms. Collins stated that Stephen was a college student, like herself, and that they both attended Miskatonic University where they met. She informed me that Stephen studied Theology under Professor Weylen Griswold and that he otherwise maintained the average student life with no job to speak of. With nothing more to gain from conversing with Ms. Collins, I bid her farewell, saying I would keep her informed of any developments in the case.

Finally I had something to chew on. I went back to the net, hoping for leads that would bring some clarity to my scattered thoughts.

First I tried the strange characters from Ms. Collins's phone, scarcely a language at all, so far as I could tell. No search returned anything, and I was left to assume the message was written in no recorded language, written or spoken. My questions had not shrunk. They had multiplied.

But where Ms. Collins had seen only gibberish, I could put a value to the string of numbers at the end. Coordinates, marking the exact location of the abandoned Monserta Glassworks. Had Stephen known what was coming and sent a warning to the one person he could trust? Or was there something more deliberate in it?

Filing away that piece of evidence, I attempted to contact Professor Griswold of Miskatonic University. Calling his listed office number forwarded me to the desk of his secretary, Mrs. Reyes. A reasonably amiable woman, she informed me that the professor was currently on sabbatical and unsure when he would return. Not wanting to lose a lead, I employed some advanced interrogation tactics, to which the secretary reluctantly provided me with the professor's personal cell phone number.

I hung up with Mrs. Reyes and dialed the number she had given me for Weylen Griswold. What came down that phone line was a horror so tangible that my head still shudders at the recollection. After a single ring, a voice greeted me, foul and irreverent in a way I have no clean word for, digging into my ear like something intent on nesting there.

“Mr. Trench,” it spoke like a thousand voices rising in cacophonous laughter. “We have waited too long for your presence. Time grows short, and we dream eagerly for your prodigious return. The Sentry may have sunk, but you swam. For you know what wonders The Deep has to offer to those who propagate its will. When you face yourself in the effervescent glow of silvered waves, you will see what it is you have forgotten.” The strange voice tittered before the line fell dead.

What kind of prank was this Griswold playing? And how did he know about the Sentry? Almost no one knew of my time aboard that fishing boat, and fewer still knew about the disaster that left me the only survivor.

I still remember it clearly: the night of July 21, 1994. We were on a reasonably calm voyage in Sandy Bay, east of Rockport, when a squall came up out of nowhere, pelting our ship with a violence that felt less like weather and more like intent. Then, from the starboard side, the squeal of metal as a colossal wave struck the rusting hull, and the Sentry went down under us, leaving me and my crewmates to flounder in the black water.

Of the intervening hours I have no recollection. Only impressions lodge somewhere deeper than memory, the kind that plague a man's dreams without ever resolving into anything he can describe. What I do recall is being found on the shore where the Ipswich River meets the ocean, and rushed to Beverly Hospital, where no amount of modern science could explain my survival.

How Griswold knew of the wreck, and why he chose to reveal it so mockingly, was my only question now. But answers, like happiness, are easy to seek and hard to find.

I dialed again and got a recorded message: the number was no longer in service. I dialed it several more times to be sure. It was. That left me two possibilities, and I did not like either. Maybe my mind was finally slipping. I had been sustaining myself on morphine pills since the wreck, and the pills had a way of collecting interest. Or I had heard exactly what I heard.

And so I made the decision every sensible man in my position would have refused: I went to Serwick. I packed the Colt, a bottle of whiskey, forty sixty-milligram morphine pills, and my notebook, and I drove out of Boston following a call I could not name, which both invited me and promised me sorrow.