The Lullaby of the Drowned Choir

I remember the first time I saw her, or rather, heard her. A faint, watery humming drifting down the hallway of our new house in the salt-bleached town of Port Blight. I was six, clutching a worn ragdoll, and I followed the sound to the laundry room. There, kneeling beside the washing machine, was a girl in a sodden, grey shift, her hair a tangled curtain of seaweed green. Her face was a constellation of tiny, pale scars, like cracks in porcelain, and she hummed a tune I didn’t recognize, a slow, broken version of ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’. When she turned to look at me, her eyes were the color of a stormy sea, and she smiled, showing teeth lined with something black. I screamed, and she vanished, leaving only a puddle of saltwater on the linoleum.

My father, a gruff man who spent his life at sea, told me I had a ‘sailor’s imagination’ and that the salt air was rotting my brain. My mother, however, went pale when I described her. She took me aside, her hands trembling as she clutched her own locket, and said, ‘The women in our family, we see them. The drowned ones. It’s a gift, or a curse, passed down through the daughters. Your great-grandmother saw them, and I do too.’ She warned me never to acknowledge them, to never let them know I could see, or they would follow me. I tried to obey, but the girl, whom I named ‘Tide’, was persistent.

Years passed, and I grew up in that creaking house by the harbor. Tide would appear at the foot of my bed, her humming a constant, unsettling lullaby. She would watch me from the corner of my eye, a blur of grey. When I turned thirteen, the day my own blood first came, she changed. The humming became impatient, more urgent. One morning, I woke to a sharp sting on my ankle and found a perfect circle of small, punctured wounds, like a bite from a deep-sea lamprey. I hid it from my mother, fearing her reaction. But the marks multiplied. Each night, I would feel a cold, wet pressure on my skin, and in the morning, new welts and cuts would appear on my arms, my legs, my neck.

I began to lose sleep. I would hear her humming even when I couldn’t see her, and the sound would draw me toward the water. Our house, which had always felt safe, now seemed to groan and shift, as if the tide was pulling at its foundations. I started to see other figures, too, out of the corner of my eye, ghostly forms with the same grey shifts and scarred faces, all humming in unison, forming a dissonant choir. They were in mirrors, in puddles, in the steam rising from my bath. They were getting closer.

One night, I woke to a freezing draft and saw Tide standing at the foot of my bed, dripping seawater onto the wooden floor. She was not smiling anymore. She pointed a long, pale finger toward the window, where the moon cast a silver path across the black water. ‘Join us,’ she whispered, her voice like the crash of waves on rocks. ‘You’re one of us now.’ I felt my body move against my will, my feet carrying me toward the door. My mother appeared in the hallway, her face a mask of terror. She grabbed my arm, her grip like a steel trap, and dragged me back to my room. ‘Do not answer,’ she hissed. ‘You must not answer.’ She pinned me to the bed and stayed with me until dawn, humming a different tune, an old sea shanty that felt like a ward.

But it was too late. The marks had become a map of my fate, and the humming was now inside my head. I began to see the world through a watery lens, everything distorted, everything pulling me toward the deep. The final night, I heard a great crash from the harbor. Our house, which had stood for a century, was suddenly enveloped in a thick, cold mist that smelled of salt and rot. The front door burst open, and I saw them, a procession of women in grey, their scarred faces illuminated by a sickly green light. They were singing, a haunting melody that spoke of forgotten ships and the weight of the sea. At the center stood Tide, her eyes glowing like phosphorescence. She extended her hand. ‘Come home,’ she sang.

I stepped forward, my feet numb, my mind a blur of static. My mother was behind me, shouting, but her voice was drowned out by the rising tide that flooded our living room. I saw the faces of my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, all reflected in the swirling water, all wearing the same scars, all with the same vacant expression. I understood, with a horrifying clarity, that this was not just my personal torment. It was a legacy, a calling that had been passed down for generations, waiting for me to accept. I took Tide’s hand, and the cold shot up my arm. The last thing I heard was my mother’s scream, but it was muffled, as if she was already under the sea. Then there was only silence, and the gentle, eternal hum of the drowned choir. Now, I wait. I watch the harbor, and every passing ship, and every dripping step of a new girl in Port Blight, and I hum my lullaby, hoping she will hear it and come to me.