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BEAUREGARD LIONETT
Statement of Fjord Stone, regarding a shipwreck. Original statement given… huh. Last month. Audio recording by Beauregard Lionett, head archivist of the Cobalt Institute, Zadash. Statement begins.
BEAUREGARD LIONETT (STATEMENT)
Look, I want to make it clear that I don’t think there’s anything weird going on. A friend of mine came here a little while ago to give her statement, said it was a lot of fun, and when I told her about what was happening she suggested I do the same. Very insistently. She thought it might help to get it off my chest, and apparently this is anonymous, so… here I am. I still think it’s probably nothing.
I’ve always loved the ocean. I grew up in the Menagerie Coast, so I guess it’s not surprising. I probably would’ve had a pretty shitty childhood if I didn’t like water, huh? I don’t think that’s the only reason, though; it feels like it’s always been a part of me, y’know? I can’t imagine who else I’d be if I wasn’t a sailor.
Have you ever gone to the beach, and stood at the shore, and just looked out at the sea on a clear day when there’s no ships? I used to spend hours doing that, as a kid. I still do it now, when I’m out on a long voyage, and it’s just water all around you as far as the eye can see. It’s so empty, for miles. It reminds you how small and insignificant you are. I’ve always found it soothing. Maybe you should try it; you look pretty stressed, begging your pardon.
Sorry, I’m rambling. My childhood isn’t really relevant here, except for how it brought me to the sea. I’ve worked on a boat since I was old enough to use my hands, and since I aged out of foster care I’ve been working in the shipping business. It’s easy work—or simple work, at least. It’s always suited me, in any case: I’m happy as long as I get to stay near the water, it doesn’t matter what I’m doing.
I guess I should start with Vandran. I met him maybe a year and a half ago, after a falling-out with my last crew. It wasn’t anything big! Just… well, I’m kinda clumsy, and in this industry, plus the vitiligo and everything making me stand out—I’m easy to make fun of, is what I’m getting at. Jessie says I need to learn to stand up for myself, but it just doesn’t come naturally to me.
Anyway. I left my old crew when it got too much for me, and that’s when I met Captain Vandran. He was a lot nicer to me than the last captain was—not kind, exactly, but fair. Reasonable. I told him I was looking for a ship to work on, told him I had years of experience and was good on the water, offered him my CV and all that. It wasn’t my first time finding a new job on short notice, so I had a lot of experience with the interviews. This was a weird one, though. He didn’t ask any questions for a while, just listened to me talk, all patient-like.
When I was finished, he took a long sip of his drink, just staring at me. He had a way of looking at you that made you feel small, like he could see everything he needed to in just a glance. He asked me why I wanted to work on a boat, when it had only gone badly for me so far. I was a little offended, but I answered honestly that I was happier out on the water than anywhere else, and it didn’t matter how good I was at my job or how much I got payed; I couldn’t imagine doing anything else with my life. Maybe that wasn’t something I should’ve admitted in a job interview, but the question threw me off. Vandran smiled, though, like I’d said something right. I started work the next day.
Working for Vandran was good. His crew were nice to me, for the most part, and he treated me well. Took a real shine to me, actually; he started showing me the ropes of how to run a ship myself, said I had real potential, that I could be like him someday. He wasn’t easy on me, by any means, but I didn’t need him to be. The ship was normal, the crew was normal, everything was normal except for how well it was going. Maybe that should’ve been a red flag.
It kept going like that for more than a year—longer than I’d worked on any one crew before. I’d started shadowing Vandran officially by then, and he said I was really coming along. I wasn’t nearly ready to leave the crew yet, but it was nice to think I might have other prospects. That my life might have actually been going somewhere.
I guess there were a few things that were weird, in hindsight. Vandran got these—what’s the opposite of mood swings? He was slow to anger, but when he was in a bad mood, he’d stay that way for the rest of the day—nothing extreme, though, and he was always reasonable, even on his bad days. Anyway, after a while of being around him you got to noticing how the weather matched his moods. It sort of became an inside joke among the crew; like, if it was foggy out we’d send someone to see if he needed cheering up. It was funny at the time, but looking back, I can’t remember a single time when the sun was out and he was unhappy. Maybe he just didn’t like the rain. That’s what we assumed, I think, but it just stands out to me looking back. Sometimes those clouds seemed to come out of nowhere.
I guess I should talk about Sabian.
He was a newer addition to the crew; the first one to join after me, actually. He was kind of antisocial, so I didn’t know him well. I did notice that he didn’t get on with Vandran. That didn’t exactly endear him to me, if I’m being honest, though I did try my best to be friendly. I wish I could tell you more about him, but at the time there wasn’t any reason to pay much attention to him. He didn’t seem like anything special.
I don’t even know if Sabian was important, really. Maybe it was him that caused it, maybe it was Vandran, maybe it was the ship itself. Maybe it was me, even. I mean, I know it was Sabian who did it, who made the ship sink, but I don’t know why…
Sorry, I’m skipping ahead. Things got weird a week before it sank. Vandran called me into his office, and it was an overcast day, so I figured I was in trouble. When I entered, he was more serious than I’d ever seen him, almost solemn. He asked me,
“Fjord, do you know what you’re doing with your life?”
Obviously I was confused. I told him that, like I’d said before, I’d be staying by the ocean, either in this job or another. That I was hoping to become a captain one day. Vandran just nodded, his face not changing. Then he said,
“Do you think you have it in you to replace me?”
That threw me off. He was old, but not that old! In his fifties, maybe; it was hard to tell. Not retirement age, definitely! I laughed nervously and asked if he’d gotten a call from his doctor recently. It was meant to be a joke, but it wasn’t funny. He just kept staring at me, still waiting for an answer. Eventually I told him vaguely that maybe I could be like him one day, but I didn’t think I’d get the opportunity anytime soon. He smiled drily, and told me a captain should always be prepared for the worst.
I just said, “Yes Captain,” and waited to be dismissed.
He didn’t dismiss me though, not straight away. Just kept staring at me, like I was a butterfly under a magnifying glass. It felt like some sort of test, so I stared right back at him. And… it– it might have just been my eyes playing tricks or weird lighting or something like that, but I swear his pupils went slitted. It felt like I wasn’t looking at Vandran anymore, but looking through him, into the eyes of something so much bigger, so much more than a human. It’s difficult to describe.
And then I blinked, and the effect was gone. Vandran nodded, looking more solemn than when I’d come in there. I stumbled out, dazed, and got right back to work. What else was I supposed to do? I convinced myself that whatever I’d seen was some optical illusion or whatever you call it, like you get when you look at something for too long and your mind starts making things up, and tried to put it out of my mind. Until later, when one of my coworkers came up to me and asked what we’d been talking about. Said we’d been in there more than an hour.
Then, of course, the ship sunk. I guess I can’t avoid it anymore.
We’d known the storm was coming for days, but it wasn’t supposed to cross paths with us so we didn’t change our course. It wasn’t supposed to be as bad as it was, anyway; we thought, if we somehow got caught in it, we’d survive. We probably would’ve.
The storm hit us, obviously, and it was a lot worse than the forecast said. It was worse than any storm I’d ever seen. The sky went black at midday, and we were thrown about like clothes in a washing machine. The air was so opaque with rain that the lights on the boat barely made a difference, and we had to make do with the occasional flashes of lightning. It was all hands on deck unless we wanted to sink—which is why it stood out to me when I saw Sabian slip below decks. He had a habit of disappearing sometimes, but it was always on breaks, when he was avoiding socialising. This was serious, so where the hell could he be going?!
Into the engine room, is the answer. With what I quickly found out was a bomb.
I don’t really want to go into detail about this part. It’s nothing supernatural, anyway. Just a normal, sick human being. And a bomb. Several bombs, I guess, all set off by that one in the engine room. It can’t have just been in that one, or we wouldn’t have gone down so quickly. I would’ve been able to– to what? Warn people? Say my goodbyes? I don’t know why, but my first thought was that if I could just get to Vandran, tell him what was happening, then everything would be fine. It didn’t matter anyway. I followed Sabian into the engine room, I saw him messing with something, I called out to him, he turned to face me, I saw the bomb, and then there was water all around us.
I keep thinking back to his expression, in that last split second before he was gone. He looked manic. I guess that makes sense for someone about to blow up a cargo ship, but more than anything he looked afraid. Terrified. Of what, I don’t know. Not of me, I’m sure. Of Vandran, maybe? Maybe I shouldn’t try to rationalise it; Sabian was clearly out of his mind. I don’t know. I don’t know why he did any of what he did. Why did he work with us for so long? We’d been out at sea for days at that point. Was he waiting for us to run into a storm, just to make certain there’d be no survivors? It’s not like he could’ve known the storm was coming, and surely at least Vandran would’ve noticed if he’d altered our route.
I don’t know. I don’t know why things happened the way they did, and I don’t know how I survived. Even without the storm, we were too far out to sea for any of us to swim to shore. And I didn’t swim. In fact, my last memory is of sinking.
Look, it’s been a few weeks since then, and I know trauma can cause memory loss or false memories, and I probably hit my head in the explosion too. But I came here to tell my story, and I’m gonna tell all of it. It’s part of your job to separate the truth from the fiction, isn’t it? So I’m gonna tell you all of what I remember, and you’re gonna tell me that I’m– I’m making it up as a trauma response, or I’ve got brain damage, or whatever it is.
I didn’t even try to swim. Everything hurt, and it felt like my thoughts were coming to me through a thick pane of frosted glass, and I knew nothing could help me anyway, so I guess I kind of gave up. It was freeing, actually. Under the water, everything was quiet, and the more I sank the further the storm got. The sounds of people struggling got quieter, and the flashes of lightning dimmed as my world was replaced by deep, blue darkness. It’s funny; I know that that deep underwater the pressure should’ve been agonising, but on the edge of consciousness like I was, it felt like a thick blanket. The water seeped into my ears and under my eyelids and filled my head with salt, and I let it.
At that point, I must’ve lost consciousness. There are snatches of things that feel too vivid to be dreams, but are too impossible to be real. I remember it being dark. The kind of darkness that makes everything you’ve seen before seem pale grey. I remember the sea floor sliding back, and underneath it was a smooth, glowing yellow plane, speckled with orange and brown. Then that moved too, and something black… it was a pupil, I think. As thick as a highway. It turned to look at me. There was a voice that strained my skull, saying things I can’t put into words, so deep it made my bones shake. Then it was back to darkness.
The sea comes in layers. The twilight zone is the one everyone talks about, but it’s actually the second highest one. The thickest one is the next layer down, called the midnight zone, where light no longer reaches. Under that is something called the Abyss. I know, logically, that a human being can’t survive anywhere below the sunlight zone. But at the same time, when that massive eye ground shut, I knew the darkness that followed had never seen sunlight.
I don’t know how long I floated there. I have never felt so small. There must’ve been a mile of water around me in every direction, but for all I knew it went on forever. I couldn’t see a thing, but I could feel the world moving around me. I’d feel things moving in the water, slow and vast, too large for me to picture in my head. I remember, strangely, never feeling afraid. It felt like that was where I was always meant to be.
My first clear memory after the explosion is of waking up in the hospital. Apparently someone found me passed out on the beach, covered in seaweed. The doctors let me out that same day, since apparently I was in perfect condition once my lungs had been cleared of salt water.
It had been two months since the ship sunk. I know it doesn’t make sense. Still, it feels like it should’ve been longer. It felt like years I was in that place, floating beneath the sea.
I searched online for what happened to Vandran’s ship, and there was one news article about how it disappeared “inexplicably”. Apparently there were no survivors. I don’t know if I can believe that. I don’t know if I want to, but it would be easier if I could get some kind of closure. I survived, though, so why couldn’t Vandran? Why couldn’t Sabian, for that matter?
That was three weeks ago, and since then I’ve been having dreams. I know I had to sign a form to get in here saying I wasn’t gonna talk about hallucinations and visions and what-not—and that wasn’t a lie, per se, just… okay, it was kind of a lie. But they’re not just dreams, I think.
They always start with me sinking. Not the storm, not the ship exploding, but me sinking through placid waters. It goes on like that for years, me slowly sinking as the water darkens around me. Sometimes there are other things in there with me, but I am beneath their notice.
After years of slowly sinking, once all the light has disappeared, I come to a stop. I wait. Eventually, the eye opens again. The weight of its gaze crushes me. Sometimes it talks. At first, its words just made it feel like my brain was trying to push itself out of my ears, and I’d wake up in a cold sweat with no memory of what it had said. Now, though, its words are starting to make sense, and I don’t think it’s a good thing.
“FEED,” it tells me, and my mind throbs.
I tell it that I don’t know what it means.
“CONSUME.”
Every part of me aches. I ask it how.
“LEARN.”
I feel something in my head snap, and I wake up.
The dreams have been happening more and more frequently. And every single time, I wake up choking on saltwater. No matter where I went to sleep, how far I am from the water, I spit up seawater. I know it’s a little mundane compared to everything else I’ve written here, but it’s the one part I can’t rationalise. Everything else could be explained away as a trick of the light, or a half-awake hallucination, but there are salt stains on my bedsheets and I know they’re real. I don’t know what it means, but it scares me.
I haven’t gone back to my old work since. I’m not scared of the water—though I think maybe I should be. It’s more like… it wouldn’t feel right to go back to working cargo ships like nothing has changed. I guess nothing has changed, except that I lost a friend. Maybe that’s it: maybe I’m still in mourning, and one day I’ll go back to the person I was before all this. Until then, I’ll be in my little boat on the river, catching fish. It’s a nice change of pace.
BEAUREGARD LIONETT
Statement ends.
Okay, this is a weird one. The only supernatural part of the statement is impossible to verify, which usually means it’s a load of bullshit. The information on the ship seems to check out, or at least the part about it disappearing with no survivors. I guess that doesn’t disprove Mr. Stone’s account, but it definitely doesn’t support it, either. The stretch of ocean it disappeared in isn’t significant in any way that I’ve been able to find; it’s not the Bermuda Triangle or anything, just some random spot in the middle of the Pacific.
Not that I think there actually was a sea monster. Like Fjord says, there’s nothing here that can’t be explained away pretty easily. Apart from the coughing up water in his sleep thing. I don’t know, maybe that’s some freak medical condition? If it is supernatural, it’s not exactly bone-chilling. I’m not even gonna touch on his “weird dreams”. All dreams are weird, dude, especially when you almost died a month ago.
I asked Eadwulf to get in touch with Mr. Stone for follow-up, but apparently he was “unable to reach him”. (Exasperated) It didn’t sound like he tried very hard, but what am I supposed to do about it? It’s not like I have the authority to fire him, and I doubt Ikithon would listen to any complaints about the assistants he personally selected. It’s not that important, anyway. I just wanted to see if his nightmares had gotten any better. It sounds like he should’ve given this statement to a therapist, not an archive.
End recording.
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