The Saltwater Hymnal

In the autumn of 1987, when I was six, my parents uprooted us from the dry inland sprawl of Bakersfield to a crooked, salt-bitten house on the edge of Cape Miskatonic, Maine. The house, known locally as the Merrow House, had belonged to a silent film star named Elspeth Wainwright, who had vanished in 1953 under circumstances that the town preferred not to discuss. My father, a man who collected decrepit properties like seashells, saw it as a bargain; my mother saw it as a chance to start over after the fire. I only saw the lavender room with the arched window that faced the sea, and the hallway that smelled of wet wool and something faintly sweet, like rotting apples.

My first intrusion happened on a night so thick with fog that the lighthouse beam seemed to be swallowed whole. I woke to the sound of dripping, but the roof was sound, and the pipes were new. Drawn by a pale, pulsing glow, I slipped out of bed and padded down the hall. The door to the linen closet, which I had never once seen open, was ajar, and from it came a low, rhythmic hum, like the singing of a submerged congregation. Inside, the shelves were bare save for a single leather-bound book, its cover embossed with a silver fish. The book was open to a hymn, and as I leaned in, the ink rearranged itself into a silhouette of a woman with hollow eyes, her mouth open in a silent, endless note. I remember stumbling backward, and the closet door slammed shut on its own, the hum ceasing abruptly. When I told my parents, my mother blamed the fog, and my father blamed the wind, but the book was gone by morning, and I found a single silver scale on the floor where it had lain.

Over the following years, the house began to speak in other ways. In my bedroom, the wallpaper would peel in the shape of fish skeletons, and I would hear the skittering of something within the walls, a sound like a hundred tiny fins against plaster. The kitchen faucet would drip in a pattern that, if I listened too long, became a chorus of names I didn’t recognize. Most unnerving was the well in the backyard, which had been sealed with a concrete cap. At night, if I pressed my ear to the cold stone, I could hear a gentle, lapping sound, as if the well were filling with an unseen tide. And always, from the top of the stairs, I would catch a glimpse of a woman in a shimmering gown, her hair like dried seaweed, her eyes like two pools of black water, mouthing something I could never quite hear. She would vanish when I blinked, leaving only the smell of brine and the faint, sweet odor of decay.

The final unraveling came on the night of my tenth birthday, when I blew out the candles on my cake—a coconut confection my mother had made from an old recipe she found in the pantry. As the smoke curled up, I saw the woman clearly for the first time, not as a ghost but as a presence in the room, her hand hovering over my shoulder, pointing toward the ceiling. The next morning, I climbed into the attic, drawn by a musty, familiar smell. There, tucked beneath a loose floorboard, I found a journal wrapped in oilcloth. It was Elspeth’s diary, the last entry dated the day she vanished. The handwriting was frantic, looping like the coils of a serpent: ‘The tide is coming in, and I have to go into the water. I have to feed the hymn.’ The page beneath was stained with something dark, and in the margin was a drawing of a fish with a human eye. I slammed the journal shut, but I could still hear the hum, now rising from all around me, from the walls, the floor, the very air. It was the sound of a thousand drowned voices, harmonizing in a language that predated man, and it was singing to me by name. I ran from the house, but as I crossed the yard, I saw the woman in the window of my room, her mouth moving in a silent, terrible refrain, and I knew then that the house had not chosen us—it had chosen me, to finish the hymn that Elspeth had started, to complete the note that had been building for over a century. I never returned to the Merrow House, but I can still hear the tide, and on quiet nights, if I focus hard, I can almost make out the words. They are my own, and they are hungry.