The Last Ferry to Morrow

The morning fog was thick enough to drown in. I woke up with my face pressed against the cold window of my rented cottage on Morrow Island—a speck of land off the coast of Maine, reachable only by a ferry that ran three times a day. My phone glowed 6:58 AM. I had two hours before the first ferry, but I wasn’t going anywhere. I was here to finish a novel, to escape the noise of the city, and to forget the silence that had settled in my apartment after my brother’s funeral. I pulled the quilt over my head, trying to slip back into the dreamless dark.

Then a voice, male, low and gravelly, spoke from the corner of the room—not near the door, but close to my ear, as if someone had knelt beside the bed. “Elise.”

I froze. My breath caught. I knew I was alone. The ferryman had been emphatic: no one else on the island until the summer season. The voice was not my own, not a trick of the wind. It was too intimate, too real. I squeezed my eyes shut, my heart hammering. “Please,” I whispered, “go away.”

A pause. Then, softer, almost wounded: “I guess I have to go now.” The words carried a weight that pressed down on my chest. A wave of sorrow—not mine, but something external, ancient—flooded through me. Tears leaked from my closed eyes. I didn’t know why I was crying, but I felt as if I had just lost someone again. And then it was gone.

I told myself it was a hypnagogic hallucination. I had read about them. But the sadness lingered all morning, a cold film over everything. I tried to write, but the words wouldn’t come. The fog refused to lift, and the island felt even more isolated.

At noon, I called my friend Nina on the satellite phone—the only connection to the mainland. As I recounted the incident, my free hand rested on my knee. Then I felt it: a light tug at the ends of my hair, as if someone were softly curling a strand. My skin prickled. “Stop,” I said sharply into the air. “Go somewhere else.” The tugging ceased immediately, and the line went silent. Nina’s voice came through, tinny: “Elise? You still there? You’re scaring me.”

I laughed it off, but my hand was trembling.

Half an hour later, a knocking started in the dining room—three slow raps, then a pause, then two more. I had left the door closed, and the room was empty. I got up, my legs weak. The knocking continued, rhythmic, almost polite. I pushed the door open a crack. The room was dim, the chairs pushed in, the table bare. The knocking stopped. I stood there, feeling watched.

Then I noticed the window. In the glass, where my reflection should have been, there was a man—tall, gaunt, with eyes too dark to be human. He was wearing a sou’wester hat, the kind fishermen wear, and his lips were moving silently, forming my name. I stumbled back, and the reflection vanished.

I ran out of the cottage, into the dense fog that muffled all sound. The path to the dock was only a hundred yards, but I ran until my lungs burned. The ferry was already there—a small trawler, its engine coughing. The ferryman, an old man named Mr. Ellery, was untying the ropes. He looked up, surprised.

“You’re early,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting anyone till the evening run.”

“I need to get off this island,” I said, my voice shaking.

He studied me for a long moment. “You’ve seen him, haven’t you? The old captain.”

“Who?”

“Captain Morrow. He was the one who brought the first settlers here. Died in the fog, they say. But he never left. He waits for a passenger to take over. Every few years, someone fresh comes to the island, and he tries to convince them to stay.”

I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the sea air. “He touched my hair. He talked to me.”

Mr. Ellery nodded slowly. “He’s lonely, poor soul. But if you stay, you’ll become like him. Trapped between the living and the dead.”

The fog began to shift, and for a moment, I could have sworn I saw a figure standing at the edge of the dock, waving. Not threateningly—wistfully. A man in a sou’wester hat, his face a pale blur.

“Take me back,” I said.

He helped me aboard. As the ferry pulled away, the fog closed in behind us, swallowing the island whole. I never looked back. But even now, days later, I sometimes feel a soft tug at my hair, and I hear that voice, sad and resigned, whispering, “I guess I have to go now.” And I realize—he wasn’t saying that to leave. He was saying it because he had finally found someone willing to hear him, to acknowledge his existence. And I had sent him away. The guilt is a fine, cold thread that wraps around my heart.

I suppose I will always wonder: if I had said, “Stay,” what would have happened? But I didn’t. And now, the only thing I have left is this story—and the terrible hope that he finds someone else, someone braver than me.