It was in the year 1908, upon the vast and indifferent Atlantic, that I found myself aboard the steamship Narcissus, labouring eastward through a fog so thick it seemed the sea had drawn a shroud over its hidden face. I was mate then—Clark, they called me—and though I had crossed these waters many times, a strange heaviness settled upon me that voyage, as if the air itself carried a warning too subtle for words.
The crew went about their duties in the usual silence, yet I felt it too: a restlessness, an oppression of the spirit. The foghorn groaned at intervals, its note lingering like a lament in the damp air, and the sea lay unnaturally still beneath us—no swell, no breath of wind, only a glassy calm that made the ship seem suspended in some grey void between sky and depth.
I stood upon the bridge in the cold half-light of the dawn watch, peering into the murk, when the feeling sharpened into something colder, more primal. It was not fear exactly—not yet—but a hollow dread, the sense of being watched by something immense and patient, something that knew the ship and every soul aboard as fleeting intrusions upon its ancient domain. The hairs on my neck rose; my breath came shorter. The ocean, which I had always taken for a familiar adversary, now felt alive with hidden intent, holding its secrets close beneath that treacherous calm.
And then, out of the mist ahead, the shape began to rise.