The Gunner’s Watch

In the autumn of 1940, my father’s older brother, Dieter, was a young torpedoman on a Schnellboot, a fast attack craft prowling the cold, gray waters of the English Channel. His duty was grim: to fish downed Luftwaffe pilots out of the sea before the cold claimed them or the British boats found them. It was a task that demanded precision and nerve, but it was also one that exposed the crew to the peculiar horrors of a war fought above and below the waves.

On a moonless night thick with fog, Dieter’s boat—the S-13—was dispatched to a sector where a bomber had gone down. The sea was a black mirror, disturbed only by the low growl of the engines and the hiss of the bow cutting through swells. As they approached the reported position, the lookout’s voice rang out: a faint, rhythmic splashing, like a swimmer in distress. They throttled down and drifted silent, listening.

The sound grew closer—a wet, slapping noise, not frantic but deliberate. Then they saw it: a figure in a dark, dripping flight suit, bobbing in the waves, one arm raised in a slow, mechanical wave. The skipper ordered the searchlight on. The beam revealed a man’s face, pale as bone, with eyes that seemed to reflect no light. He was close enough to grab, yet he made no move to swim. He simply floated, staring, as the crew shouted and threw lines.

One of the sailors, a young radioman named Keller, leaned over the side and caught the man’s wrist. The moment he touched it, the figure’s mouth opened, but instead of a cry, only a long, low hum emanated—a sound that vibrated in their chests and made the metal deck plates shudder. Then the face seemed to distort, the features running like wet clay, and the body began to sag, collapsing into a heap of sodden cloth and something that looked like tangled seaweed. The searchlight flickered, and when it steadied, the thing was gone, leaving only a faint oily sheen on the water.

Keller recoiled, shaking, and refused to touch the water again. The crew were shaken, but they had orders. They resumed their patrol, trying to dismiss the incident as a trick of the night and their frayed nerves. But after that, strange things began to happen aboard the S-13.

First, they found water in the fuel tanks, though the hatches had been sealed. Then, the compass would spin in wild circles whenever they approached the spot where they’d seen the figure. The crew began to whisper about a curse. Dieter, a pragmatic man, chalked it up to the stress of war, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching them from beneath the hull.

A week later, during a night action, the S-13 engaged a British motor torpedo boat. In the chaos of the firefight, Dieter saw a figure standing on the bow of the enemy craft—a tall, gaunt shape in a tattered uniform, pointing directly at him. He froze, and in that instant, the enemy’s shell struck the bridge, killing the skipper and the helmsman. Dieter was thrown into the sea. When he surfaced, the enemy boat was gone, and the S-13 was sinking. He clung to a floating crate, watching his comrades drown one by one, their cries turning to that same low hum before they were pulled under.

Dieter survived, washed ashore on the English coast and taken prisoner. He spent the rest of the war in a POW camp, but he never spoke of that night. When he returned home after the war, he was a different man—hollow-eyed, prone to staring at the sea for hours. He told my father, who was just a boy, that he’d seen something that night that no man should see. He said that the thing in the water wasn’t a dead pilot; it was a guardian of the deep, a creature that fed on the souls of the drowned and used their shapes to lure the living. He made my father promise never to go near the sea at night, and my father kept that promise until the day he died.

Years later, when Dieter passed away, his belongings were given to my father. Among them was a small, worn logbook from the S-13. The last page had a single entry, scrawled in Dieter’s trembling hand: ‘We are not alone. It knows our names. It has the watch now.’ The rest of the pages were blank, except for a drawing in pencil at the bottom—a crude sketch of a dark, elongated shape with fins, rising from the depths, its eyes like two empty sockets.

I have that logbook now. I keep it in a locked box, away from windows and water. Sometimes, at night, I hear a faint hum from inside the box, and I feel a cold draft, as if a door to the sea has opened. I’ve never opened the box again, and I never will. But I know that whatever we encountered in that channel is still there, patient, waiting. And it has my name too. It has all our names.