The Circuit of St. Elmo

It was the summer I turned nineteen, and I was staying with my cousin Miriam in her converted attic apartment above an old hardware store in the coastal town of Port Blakely. The place was a labyrinth of sloped ceilings and exposed beams, and Miriam had strung up old fishing nets and buoys from the walls, which clinked softly whenever the sea wind rattled the windows. That night, we had been watching old VHS tapes on her clunky TV, but the screen had started to flicker with a greenish hue, and Miriam had turned it off with a sigh. ‘Probably the wiring,’ she said, ‘This building’s older than the lighthouse.’

We decided to call it a night and sat in the dark, the only light being the faint phosphorescent glow from the buoys that had absorbed the day’s sun. Miriam was recounting a story about a local fisherman who swore he saw a ghost ship in the harbor, but I wasn’t really listening. I was watching the center of the room, where the shadows seemed to be just a bit too solid. Then I saw it: a sphere of light, about the size of a volleyball, hovering a few feet off the floor. It was not like any light I had seen before. It was a pale, greenish-white, and it pulsed gently, like a jellyfish. It didn’t illuminate anything around it; it simply hung there, a self-contained ball of glow.

I grabbed Miriam’s arm. ‘Do you see that?’ I whispered. She went rigid, and I felt her fingers dig into my forearm. ‘Yes,’ she said, her voice tight. ‘Don’t move.’ The orb began to move, very slowly, in a smooth arc, tracing a shape in the air. It would dim almost to nothing, then reappear a few inches further along, and it kept doing this, tracing a pattern that was unmistakable: the letter U, over and over, as if it were writing something in the air. We watched, frozen, as it completed the shape perhaps a dozen times, each time starting at the left foot of the U, rising to the curve, and descending to the right foot, then vanishing and starting again.

Miriam began to mumble something, an old fisherman’s prayer, I think, but I was transfixed. The orb wasn’t just glowing; it was humming. A low, electrical hum that I felt in my teeth. Then, slowly, it began to fill in the U, the light spreading like liquid metal, forming a vertical line on the left side, then the curve at the top, then the right side. In a matter of seconds, a glowing, human-sized ‘U’ stood in the center of the room. The hum grew louder, and I started to feel a static charge in the air, like before a thunderstorm. The hair on my arms stood on end.

The U started to rotate, the opening facing us, and I saw that inside the U was not empty. There was a darkness there, a blackness so complete that it seemed to absorb even the glow of the U itself. And there was a sound, like the deep tolling of a bell underwater, muffled and ominous. Miriam suddenly let go of my arm and clapped her hands over her ears, and I did the same, but the sound got inside my head anyway. It was not a bell; it was a voice, garbled and slow, like it was speaking through layers of water and sand, and I thought I could make out a single word, repeated over and over: ‘Return.’ My chest felt heavy, and I felt a pull, as if the U was a doorway and something was trying to draw me in.

I remember grabbing Miriam’s hand, and we both scrambled backward until we hit the wall. The U followed us, not moving, but the room seemed to shrink around it. The glow of the buoys flickered and died. The only light was that terrible U and its churning black core. My lungs burned, and I realized I had been holding my breath. I gasped for air, and as I did, the U suddenly snapped shut like a closing mouth, and the light vanished. The room was plunged into absolute darkness, and the only sound was our ragged breathing. For a long time, we didn’t move. Then Miriam’s phone lit up, and she fumbled to turn on the flashlight. The room looked exactly as it had before, except the buoys had lost their glow, and a faint, ozone smell lingered.

We didn’t sleep that night. We sat in the corner, the flashlight pointed at the center of the room, until the gray dawn crept through the porthole window. When we finally mustered the courage to look, there was nothing there. But I noticed something odd on the wooden floor: a faint, circular scorch mark, about the size of a basketball, right at the spot where the orb had first appeared. Miriam and I never spoke of it again, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that word: ‘Return.’ I started researching local legends, and I found a grim story from the 1930s about a ship called the St. Elmo that had vanished in a strange storm off Port Blakely. The captain’s name was Hume, and his last log entry said they were being pursued by a ‘circle of light’ in the shape of the letter U. He wrote, ‘It wants us to return to the deep.’ A week after the incident, I moved out of the attic. But sometimes, when I close my eyes, I still see that U, and I feel that pull, and I hear that underwater voice calling me back. I know it’s not done with me.