The Uninvited Gulls

The cottage at Seal Point had been our weekend retreat for years, but this Saturday was different. My wife, Eleanor, and I had agreed to house-sit for our daughter, Cara, while she and her husband, Marcus, took a last-minute trip to a secluded island resort off the coast of Maine. The ferry left at dawn, and we waved them off with thermoses of coffee and promises to water the plants.

By midday, the sun had burned off the fog, and the gulls were wheeling overhead, their cries sharp against the salt air. Eleanor and I sat on the weathered deck, sipping iced tea, when I noticed a gull perched on the railing, staring at me with an unsettling steadiness. It didn’t flinch when I waved my hand. Instead, it tilted its head and let out a low, mournful call that sounded almost like a word: ‘Ellen.’ I laughed it off, but Eleanor’s smile had frozen.

That evening, as we prepared dinner, the calls intensified. Gulls began to gather on the roof, their shadows flitting past the kitchen window. I tried to ignore them, but then I heard it again—this time from inside. A voice, thin and reedy, unmistakably saying ‘Eleanor’ from the hallway. I dropped the spoon, and Eleanor grabbed my arm. ‘We should not have come,’ she whispered.

The power flickered and went out. We fumbled for candles, and in the dancing flame, I saw a shape in the doorway—a woman, drenched and shivering, with seaweed tangled in her hair. She was reaching for Eleanor, her mouth moving but emitting only the cries of gulls. I screamed, and Eleanor turned to me with hollow eyes, her voice layered with the screech of a hundred birds: ‘She wants me to go with her.’

We fled to the car, but the gulls descended like a living storm, battering the windshield with their beaks. The woman’s voice rose above the chaos: ‘You took my child, now I take yours.’ I realized then—Cara had mentioned the original owner’s daughter had drowned off the rocks decades ago, and that she had secretly kept a pair of baby gulls as pets until the day they mysteriously vanished. The mother gull had never forgiven.

By the time we reached the main road, the gulls had retreated. We found a motel and collapsed, shaking, into the bed. Eleanor didn’t sleep; she sat by the window, watching the distant lighthouse. In the morning, she was gone. The only trace was a single gull feather on her pillow, and a faint voice outside, cooing, ‘Eleanor, come home.’