The Wet Cards

The salt-stained walls of the Blue Meridian Hotel on Ko Lipe had absorbed decades of monsoon rain and tourist sweat. I’d chosen it for its balcony view of the Andaman Sea, a sapphire smear that promised calm. But on the third night of my solo trip, the calm fractured.

I woke to a percussive slam against my door—three heavy knocks, then a fourth that rattled the frame. A voice, raw and gargled, screamed through the wood: ‘Wave! Wave! Get out!’ My heart seized. I sat up in the dark, the sheets twisted around my ankles, and stared at the door. The voice cut off mid-word. Silence. Then, from the corner near the bathroom, a wet, dragging sound. A shadow peeled from the darkness, not human but a shape of oily black, and a whisper, desperate and thin, curled into my ear: ‘Don’t let the cards get wet… don’t let them get wet…’

I froze. The air turned thick, smelling of brine and rot. The shadow lunged, and I blinked—and I was sitting bolt upright in my bed, the same position as in the dream, my chest heaving. The room was still. The balcony door was open, and the curtains swayed gently, as if someone had just passed through. I was drenched in cold sweat, and on the nightstand, beside my phone, lay a deck of playing cards I didn’t own. They were damp, edges curled, and splayed like a discarded hand.

I didn’t sleep again. At dawn, I took the cards to the front desk. The clerk, an old Thai man named Somchai, went pale when he saw them. He turned them over, his fingers trembling, and whispered, ‘Where did you get these?’ I explained. He shook his head and said, ‘This room… it was closed for years. After the 2004 tsunami. The sea took the lower floors, but the third? They said it was safe. But the owners, they never reopened it. Not until last month.’ He looked at me with hollow eyes. ‘The cards belonged to a family. The mother, she was a card player. She died on this floor. Her daughter survived, but she never got out of the water. They found her hands gripping the railing on the balcony, her fingers raw from trying to climb. The cards were in her pocket. They said she kept trying to deal them, even as the water rose.’

I left Ko Lipe the next morning. But the cards came with me. They were in my bag when I unpacked at home, though I swore I’d thrown them into the sea. The damp never dried. Even now, on dry land, the edges stay moist, and sometimes, when I pick them up, I feel the faint pulse of a heartbeat in the cardboard. Last night, I dealt myself a hand—five cards, all face down. I turned over the first: the Joker. The second: another Joker. The third, fourth, fifth: all Jokers. And in the corner of my room, near the bathroom, I heard a soft, mocking laughter, and the whisper: ‘Don’t let them get wet…’

I haven’t touched them since. But this morning, I woke to find them arranged on my pillow, spread into a fan. And on the back of each card, in handwriting that is not mine, a single word: ‘HELP.’ They are still wet.