The Undertow of July

Cass and I had just moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of the salt marsh, three acres of wild grass and tidal mud that smelled like rot and sea. We brought our three cats with us, the ones we’d raised from a sickly litter we’d found in a dumpster behind a seafood shack in Virginia. They were our whole world, the reason we’d chosen this place, away from the noise and the traffic that had already claimed one of their siblings. We called them the three graces, though there was nothing graceful about their hunting.

The house had been empty for years, but it was cheap, and Cass swore the ghosts were just the wind in the reeds. I wasn’t so sure. The first night, I woke to the sound of scratching, not from the walls, but from the floorboards under our bed. It was rhythmic, like something trying to dig up from below. Cass slept through it; she always did. But our oldest cat, Fern, sat at the foot of the bed, her ears flat, staring at the corner of the room where the floor met the baseboard.

By July, the marsh was alive with insects, a drone that never stopped, and the tide brought in a smell that turned our stomachs at first, but we got used to it. We let the cats out at dusk, as we always had, believing that a life with freedom, even one cut short, was better than a life caged. We’d lost our first cat to a car because of that belief, and we mourned her, but we didn’t change.

The first sign was a dead heron, its long neck twisted, lying on our porch one morning. It hadn’t been there the night before. The cats were inside, dozing, but none of them would go near the door. They’d been acting strange anyway, clustering together in the hallway, their tails bushed, yowling at nothing. Cass said it was the new house, the unfamiliar smells. I wasn’t so sure.

Then the dreams started: I’d be standing in the marsh at low tide, the mud up to my knees, and the water would start to bubble, and from it would rise a shape, not quite human, but with eyes too white and a mouth too wide. It would open its mouth and sing, a sound like the hum of a refrigerator but deeper, and the mud would pull me down. I’d wake screaming, and Cass would hold me, but she had her own dreams now, she said. In hers, the cats were all gone, and she was searching for them in the reeds, and something was moving just out of sight, keeping pace with her.

The cats started staying out all night. We’d call them, but they wouldn’t come. Then, one evening, Fern came home with something in her mouth, but it wasn’t a mouse or a bird. It was a small, shriveled thing, brown and leathery, like a piece of dried fruit. She dropped it on the rug and meowed, and when I bent to look, it was a finger. A human finger, tiny, as if from a child, but too shriveled. I screamed, and Cass came running. She paled when she saw it, and without a word, she wrapped it in a paper towel and threw it in the trash can outside. She said it must be from the dump we found the cats in originally, that they’d carried it with them somehow. But that dump was a hundred miles away.

The next morning, the trash can was overturned, and the finger was gone. The ground around our house was marked with strange symbols, scratched into the dirt, like overlapping circles and lines. I didn’t put them there. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake listening to the marsh, the ceaseless hum, and I heard a new sound: a wet, dragging noise, like something heavy being pulled through the mud, coming closer to the house. I got up and looked out the window. The moon was full, and I saw all three cats standing in a row at the edge of the marsh, their heads tilted, staring at something in the water. I couldn’t see what, but then the water bulged, and a shape rose out of it, impossibly tall, its flesh like wet clay, and it began to walk towards the cats. I ran out, screaming, but by the time I reached the marsh, there was nothing there, just the cats, who turned and looked at me with eyes that were not their own. They had a flat, calculating sheen, like they were seeing me for the first time.

We tried to leave the next day. We packed the car, but the ignition wouldn’t turn. The radio flickered on by itself, playing static, and beneath the static, I could hear a hum, the same hum from my dream. Cass tore the dash apart, but the radio kept playing. The cats watched us from the porch, not moving, their heads tracking our every step. And then, as if on cue, they all turned and walked into the tall grass of the marsh, and we haven’t seen them since.

That was two weeks ago. We’re still here, because the car won’t start, and our phones are dead, and the road we came in on seems to have been swallowed by the marsh. Every night, the hum gets louder, and I sit by the window, watching the reeds, hoping to see a familiar tabby shape, but I see nothing. Only the water, and beneath it, a shadow that shifts and moves with the tide. And last night, I felt the wet, dragging sound at the front door, and when I opened it, there was a line of mud, as if something had come in and walked down the hall to the bedroom, and the floorboards were wet underneath it, and I heard a scratching, not under the bed, but from the closet, and I know that when I gather the courage to open it, I will find nothing, because they are already inside me, the way they were always inside the cats. The hum is in my teeth now, and I can taste salt.
}