The Saltwater Nursery

Six months ago, I was living in a cramped apartment on the third floor of a converted warehouse near the docks, just a few blocks from the marine biology institute where I was finishing my thesis. My son, Leo, was just over a year old, and my cousin, Mara, had moved in to help me out after my husband left. It was a tough time, but we were managing.

For a summer course on folklore and the supernatural, our professor gave us an assignment to investigate a local site with a reputation for being haunted. The institute itself had an old research vessel, the ‘Meridian’, which was being decommissioned and slated for scrapping. It had a storied history, including a mysterious fire that killed three researchers in the 1970s. My mother was a janitor there, so I knew the staff, and they agreed to let me and a few classmates tour the ship one night.

I brought Leo along because I couldn’t find a sitter. He was usually a calm, happy baby, but the moment we stepped onto the ship’s deck, he started wailing. It wasn’t his normal hungry or tired cry; it was a full-blown tantrum, his face red, his little fists clenched. Mara tried to soothe him, but he wouldn’t stop until we left the ship. I managed to snap a few photos on my phone, but they only showed faint, blurry lights that I chalked up to reflections.

Over the next couple of weeks, strange things began to happen in our apartment. Leo’s toys would vanish from his playpen and reappear in the bathroom sink, arranged in a neat circle. At first, I thought Mara was cleaning up, but she denied it. Then, I started hearing scratching sounds inside the walls, like something was crawling through the pipes. I dismissed it as rats, but the sound followed us from room to room.

One night, I woke up to Leo’s cries. I went to his crib and found him staring at the ceiling, his eyes wide. He was pointing up and babbling, ‘Water, water.’ I looked up, but there was nothing but the dull paint. The next day, I noticed a damp stain spreading across the ceiling directly above his crib. Our upstairs neighbors swore they hadn’t spilled anything.

Things escalated when I began finding wet footprints on the floor, even though no one had been near water. The footprints were small, child-sized, but they didn’t match Leo’s feet. They’d appear in the hallway, leading from the front door to the nursery, and sometimes they’d be accompanied by the faint smell of brine, like the ocean.

About a month later, I was home alone with Leo. Mara had gone out for groceries. I was in the kitchen, and I heard a crash from the nursery. I rushed in and found Leo’s toy boat, a little wooden thing, floating in a puddle of water in the middle of the rug. The puddle was oddly shaped, like a map of some unknown island, and the water smelled strongly of salt. Leo was sitting in his crib, giggling and clapping, pointing at the boat. ‘Fishies,’ he said.

I called my mother, who had worked at the institute for decades. She told me about the history of the Meridian. The researchers who died in the fire weren’t just studying fish; they were investigating a strange organism found in a deep-sea trench, something that seemed to have a consciousness. They believed it could communicate, and they were trying to record its sounds. During the fire, the audio tapes were destroyed, but some people believed the creature had latched onto the ship, waiting for a new host.

My blood ran cold. I remembered Leo’s reaction on the ship, and now these wet footprints and the saltwater. I looked at my son, who was now humming a low, mournful tune that I’d never heard before. It sounded like a whale song.

The next night, I decided to confront whatever was in our apartment. I set up my laptop to record, and I left a baby monitor in the nursery. At 3 a.m., I woke to a loud bang from Leo’s room. I ran in and found him standing in his crib, staring at the window. The window was open, and a cold wind was blowing in, but we were on the third floor. The curtains were soaked, and water was dripping onto the floor. Leo pointed out into the darkness and said, ‘She’s here.’

I looked out the window and saw a shape on the dock below, illuminated by a distant streetlight. It was a woman, drenched, her hair over her face, standing perfectly still, staring up at our window. My heart raced. I grabbed Leo and ran to the living room, calling my mother and then the police. When they arrived, there was no one there, but they found a trail of wet footprints leading from the dock to the front door of our building, and up the stairs, stopping right outside our apartment door.

The next morning, Leo was quiet, but he kept pointing at the bathroom. I went in and found the bathtub filled to the brim with saltwater, and floating on the surface was a small, black object. It looked like a burnt piece of plastic, but when I picked it up, it was cold and had a faint outline of a face on it. I recognized it as a fragment from the old audio tapes from the Meridian.

I knew then that whatever had been on that ship had followed us home, and it wanted something. It had fixated on Leo. The only way to get rid of it, according to my mother, was to return the tape fragment to the sea. So that night, I drove to the coast, took a small boat out to the exact spot where the researchers had found the organism, and threw the fragment into the water. I whispered an apology, and I felt a release.

For a week, everything was normal. The water stains dried up, the smell of salt faded, and Leo’s toys stayed put. But yesterday, I found a new scratch mark on the wall above Leo’s crib. It looked like a series of symbols, or maybe a message. And in the bathtub, there’s a faint, wet outline of a woman’s body, as if someone had been lying there, watching me. Leo is in his crib, humming that whale song again, and when I look at his eyes, they seem a little too dark, a little too deep, like the ocean floor. I don’t know what I did wrong, but I think she’s not gone. She’s just waiting, and she’s getting stronger.