The Sunken Choir

The idea came to me during a week of sleepless nights and a cheap anthology of maritime myths. I’d devoured every ghost story I could find, but the one that stuck was about a drowned chapel off the coast of a forgotten island, its bells supposed to ring for those who listened too closely. I was a librarian, a creature of catalogues and indexes, and I’d never believed a word of it. Yet there I was, standing on the salt-bleached pier of Portmorrow, a village that seemed to exist only in the fog between the mainland and nowhere.

My name is Elias, and I’ve always been drawn to the edges of maps, places where the ink fades into rumor. Portmorrow was such a place, a cluster of weather-beaten cottages and a single pub, The Lurker’s Rest, where the locals spoke of the chapel as if it were a toothache they’d learned to ignore. ‘Don’t row out when the tide’s low,’ an old woman with eyes like tide pools warned me. ‘The choir don’t take kindly to newcomers.’ I laughed it off, bought a bottle of rum, and resolved to find my own proof.

It wasn’t a Ouija board this time, but a compulsion, a whispered itch in my skull that grew louder each night. I’d heard that the chapel’s foundation stones were cut from a stone that drank in the sorrow of the drowned, and that if you placed a bowl of seawater and a shard of black glass at its altar, you might hear the dead sing. I was a skeptic still, but a thirsty one, and after a week of research in the village’s moldering records, I found the old ferryman, a man named Silas, who was willing to take me out to the island for a handful of silver and a story I promised to forget.

The morning of my departure was thick with sea fog, the kind that swallows sound and direction. Silas rowed in silence, his oars slicing the water like a knife through silk. The island emerged as a dark scar on the horizon, a slab of rock with a broken spire sticking up like a rotten tooth. The chapel was half-sunk, its roof caved in, and the tide was low, exposing a slippery path of weed-covered stones leading to the door. Silas wouldn’t set foot on it. ‘I’ll wait here,’ he said, ‘but mark me, if the water starts to rise, you row back yourself or you’ll be joining the choir.’

I climbed out, my boots squelching on the wet rock. The door was a gaping mouth, its wood rotted to spongy black. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of brine and something else, like old copper. The floor was a slurry of mud and broken pews, and at the far end, where the altar should have been, was a dark pool, perfectly round, as if the stone had been bored by a giant auger. I took out my bowl, filled it with the pool’s black water, and placed a shard of black volcanic glass I’d pocketed from the beach. The water in the bowl began to shimmer, not with light, but with a dark iridescence, like oil on a whale’s back.

A sound rose from the pool, a low hum that vibrated in my chest. It wasn’t pain, but a deep, ancient resonance that made my teeth ache. I leaned closer, and I saw faces in the water—not reflections, but the faces of the drowned, their eyes open and staring, mouths moving in a silent hymn. I stumbled back, but the pool was growing, its rim spreading across the floor like a dark stain. The hum became a choral murmur, many voices layered, singing a song that seemed to pull at my ribcage, asking me to come closer, to join a harmony that had been waiting for centuries.

I tried to move, but my legs were lead. The water rose, cold and embracing, and I felt a presence behind me—not singular, but many, as if the walls themselves were breathing. The choir was inside the water, inside my ears, inside my blood. I opened my mouth to scream, but instead, a note came out, pure and resonant, perfectly in tune with the others. It was beautiful, more beautiful than anything I’d ever heard, and it terrified me because I knew it was my own voice, and it was not alone.

When I came to, I was on the beach, face down in the wet sand, the tide lapping at my feet. Silas was standing over me, his face as blank as a slate. ‘You’re lucky the tide turned,’ he said, ‘else you’d have been a permanent member.’ I tried to speak, but my throat felt raw, and when I put my hand to my neck, I felt a new series of ridges—not scars, but something like the ridges of a shell, grafted to my skin. In the years since, I’ve returned to Portmorrow every year on the same day, always at low tide, always alone. I no longer seek ghosts; I avoid them. But every night, I dream of that pool, and in the dream, I am sinking, and the water is warm, and the choir is singing, and my own voice joins them, and I know that I haven’t escaped, only been granted a temporary leave.