The Hollow Hymn of the Blackwater Fen

The rain was a solid grey curtain over the Norfolk fens, and the narrow road was a slick of black tarmac that mirrored the low, bruised sky. Callum had taken this shortcut to his new temp job at the Thornewood Marshes Nature Reserve, a position monitoring bird populations. The radio crackled with a static-choked melody, a song he half-recognized, and he hummed along, trying to ignore the way the wind shook the skeletal reeds at the roadside.

As he approached a sudden, sharp bend he knew well, he eased off the accelerator. But the road was deceptive; a layer of standing water hid the true camber. The back of his aging Skoda slid out like a dancer rejecting a partner, and the world spun. A wild, frantic pirouette on the slick surface, the grey sky rotating into the dark peat of the drainage ditch, then the cracked dry earth of a forgotten field. The car came to a violent stop, its nose buried in a thicket of gorse, the engine sighing into silence. The radio had died, leaving a high-pitched, insectile buzz.

Shaken, Callum stumbled out into the drumming rain. He was near a place the locals called the Blackwater Fen, a name he’d only ever seen on an ordnance survey map, a patch of deep, dark water ringed by an old, collapsing wooden boardwalk. His phone had no signal, and the road, now behind him, was empty in both directions. Rain hammered on the roof of his car, a frantic percussion. He decided to walk back to the junction, where there was an old phone box he remembered, but a thick wall of reeds and a rotting stile blocked the direct route, forcing him to take a narrow, muddy path that skirted the fen’s edge.

As he walked, the rain began to ease, replaced by a thin, cold mist that slithered off the water. The path grew softer, and his boots made sucking sounds. Then, he heard it: a low, resonant hum, like a bow drawn over a double bass string, but wider, deeper, more like the earth itself groaning. It wasn’t a cry or a wail; it was a sustained, almost musical note that seemed to vibrate up through the soles of his shoes. He stopped, listening. The sound would swell, recede, then swell again, as if something was breathing out a long, slow chord.

Curiosity, that fatal flaw, drew him closer to the water’s edge. The fen was calm, a black mirror, except for one spot near the center where the surface bubbled and churned, as if a great fish were surfacing. The hum grew louder, and mixed with it came a second, higher note, like a whistle, but reedy and wrong. Callum noticed something floating near the bank: a child’s plastic boat, half-sunk, painted with a faded cartoon of a smiling sun. Then, he saw a hand. It was pale, sickly, breaking the black water, fingers stiff. A moment later, a head, hair plastered to a thin face. The creature—for it couldn’t be human, with its too-wide eyes and a mouth that hung open, emitting the hum—pulled itself onto the mud, its body glistening, slick with dark algae.

Callum backpedaled, his heart hammering. But the creature didn’t lunge. It just sat, hunched, its head tilted, studying him with that hollow gaze. Its mouth moved, and the hum shaped itself into something resembling a melody—a lullaby, slow and sad, but the notes were wrong, descending in half steps that grated. Callum felt a terrible pull in his chest, a memory of a cold night in childhood, a fever dream, a sense of being lost. He took a step forward without meaning to. The creature raised a webbed hand, beckoning.

He knew he should run, but the music was inside him now, a parasite in his bones. He thought of his mother, who had died when he was young, and how she used to hum a tune while baking. This was that tune, but polluted, dragged through the muck. A sob escaped him. He saw his life as a series of wrong turns, each leading him closer to this moment, to this being who was already singing his name, a wet, guttural ‘Callum.’ The fen’s fog thickened, and the world narrowed to just him and the creature on the bank.

His foot touched the cold water. It was warm. He looked down and saw his own reflection, but it was upside down, smiling, a mockery of his face. The creature’s song grew triumphant, a choir of wet voices joining from under the surface. He knew if he went in, he would never come out. He would become one of them, a hollow singer in the Blackwater Fen. But the song promised relief, an end to the silent dread that had gnawed at him his whole life. He wet his other foot.

Then, a sharp pain in his calf. He swatted it—a hornet? But no, it was a thorn, from a branch of the gorse that had snagged his trousers. He cried out, and the spell fractured. The creature’s face contorted in anger, its mouth stretched wide, letting out a raw, terrible shriek that echoed across the water. Callum turned and ran, the mud sucking at his boots, the reeds tearing at his clothes. He didn’t stop until he reached his car, threw himself inside, and locked the doors. When he looked back, the fen was quiet, a soft mist rising. The hum had ceased.

Now, a week later, he sits in his flat in Norwich, the rain against the window. But the hum has not stopped. It’s faint, a constant undertone in his every quiet moment. He hasn’t slept, because when he does, he dreams of the window, and the hand pressing against it from outside, skin like wet clay, and a voice that hums his mother’s lullaby, over and over. He knows it found his address. He knows it’s waiting for him to follow. And the worst part is, some nights, he finds himself humming back.