Chapter Text
I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.
- Donna Tartt
The email arrived on a cold but not unusual Thursday.
Wifies was three hours deep into a library carrel that he had annexed as his own sometime during his second week in Sheffield. He had a legal pad open to word choices. Half of the writing was trapped in unintelligible paragraphs of too-small font; he was lazily swirling the pen around on the page, doing no actual work.
His phone buzzed against the desk. It was an unremarkable notification, not at all different from the dozens of dining hall reminders and library closing alerts he usually received. The funny thing was that if the notes had been going any better, he might have let it sit there a full twenty minutes before checking. But the notes were not going well. So, he looked.
Gmail. One new message. Subject line: H.
He read the first line: Hello, Wifies.
Then, apparently, he stood up. He didn't remember making the decision to stand, registering it only after his chair scraped loudly backward and the only other girl in the library was staring at him. Wifies did the only thing his brain allowed him to do in the moment: he lifted the phone to his ear and mouthed a few words, pretending he was on a call. He drifted toward the stacks with his fake phone pressed to his head, putting a shelf of bound periodicals between himself and the girl. There, he read the rest of it.
He steeled himself, shook out his hands, and looked.
I'd be willing to talk on October 28th at 1 pm GMT.
17 Gullwatch Crescent, Cley next the Sea, Norfolk NR25 7ZX, England.
Yours, Hummer.
An address.
An address. Not a phone number. Not a Zoom link. Not even an email interview, which would have been a crude but tolerable compromise: questions typed out and answered whenever he got around to it, the natural correspondence of two people who'd never have to share a room. It would have been good for killing Wifies' dangerous curiosity, at least. Just an address, laid out so plainly it was almost as if Wifies had asked for it. A perfectly normal thing, or so Hummer made it seem. It was so convincingly simple that Wifies reread his own email to see if he had somehow slipped and asked for Hummer's house instead. He hadn't. Though with the way his mind was working lately, he wouldn't have been too surprised.
He was not going to Norfolk.
He returned to his carrel very calmly, very normally, and with that thought fully formed. He shaped it into a sentence he could cleanly say to his advisor, or even to his mother: I was approached by someone with information on my capstone, but I decided not to pursue it because it wasn't credible. Responsible. Defensible.
The reasoning behind it came quickly, and it came in order.
One: he did not know this man. Whatever autobiographical facts existed about this Hummer person amounted to an unhinged blog post that had been abandoned in 2022 with no verifiable name attached. He could be anyone. He could be sixty. He could be a teenager. He could, Wifies thought reluctantly, be someone who chose words like 'Leviathan,' 'cryptid,' and 'evidence' because they were the exact kind of words that would get a twenty-year-old on a train alone.
Two: the address was residential. Not a café, a museum lobby, or a pub filled with patrons. It was a private place without witnesses where a lot of things could happen.
Three: his capstone did not require this. He had four other topics he'd already tried and abandoned; a fifth failure would just be a fifth failure, forgettable, the kind of thing you laugh about at your thesis defense in three years. This was not that. This was entirely optional. Nobody had assigned it, and nobody would know if he never opened another Hummer email again.
Four...
He didn't have a four.
He sat with the absence of it for a while, tapping his pen against the paper without writing.
He thought about the news the way he assumed everyone his age thought about the news: not constantly, but as a kind of low, permanent hum. A set of statistics he'd absorbed without meaning to. If he wanted to distress himself because he was bored, he could always look at the news. People—usually women, usually younger than him, but not always—who answered messages that were too specific, too flattering, or too intriguing could be persuaded into getting on trains and never coming back. Wifies was not a woman, sure. He was pretty unremarkable-looking; witnesses would probably forget what he looked like, just like people in old photographs. After listing that out, he realized no coroner would care how unremarkable he was.
Yours.
Yours. Yours. Yours. Yours, Hummer.
He read those last words more than a few times. Who signed an email to a total stranger like that? Not "regards," not "best," not even just Wifies' name, but that intimate little word tossed off like they'd known each other for years. It should really read as a red flag: a manipulation tactic, the kind of manufactured warmth a con artist might reach for. That was the correct interpretation. Yes.
And still... this was Hummer. The Hummer who'd written that blog post, the one that had captured Wifies so tightly in the first place. It was chock-full of run-on sentences and genuine, undisciplined fascination, a voice that felt too specific and too strange to have been faked. Absurdly, Wifies felt like he already knew him. He was aware of how that sounded out loud, but if he didn't say it out loud, where was the problem?
He put his phone face-down on the desk with too much force. The gesture was supposed to feel final, but instead, it resulted in a sad little clap of glass against wood. He adjusted in his chair. He fiddled with his pen some more. He read the same line of his notes four times and retained none of it. His eyes tracked left to right, and left to right again, while somewhere underneath the reading his mind kept conjuring the phrase Gullwatch Crescent. What a cozy street name that was. The kind of name you could put on a postcard or the first page of a murder mystery novel, which was either a comfort or a signal of his descent into insanity. A reasonable person would probably know which of the two it was.
He picked the phone back up, weak as he was.
He read the email a fourth time, looking for a fourth line that might have appeared in the interval. An ordinary thing bolted onto the end, maybe: an actual phone number, or "feel free to call instead." Of course, there wasn't one. He set his phone back down, opened his laptop again, and typed in Cley next the Sea.
The library's Wi-Fi led the page to load so slowly that Wifies saw it come together in pieces. A tourist board site came up first, unexpectedly polished: marsh grass in a soft, color-corrected shade of gold; a windmill photographed on a once-a-year beautiful day. He scrolled. Flint cottages, a squat gray church, and a shingle beach where the tide had pulled so far out you'd have to walk a good half-mile through mud just to reach the water.
It was, he thought, precisely the kind of place he had pictured Hummer living in, if he'd let himself picture it at all (which he subconsciously had, considering the thought came to him so fully formed.
Someone could go insane there. Small, gray, and charming in that specific way that was really just a lure. The exact same charm that postcards of Sheffield traded on for people who had never been there in February.
He closed the laptop harder than necessary. Across the room, the girl looked up at him. She blinked through her tortoiseshell glasses, rolled her eyes, and looked back down.
Wifies looked out the window. The sky had gone a bruise-like shade of gray. He tried to keep his eyes fixed on that instead of his dull reflection in the glass. He thought about a great number of things in no specific order for however long he sat there: his advisor's cardigans, the name Hummer, Cley next the Sea, the fourth reason he didn't have, a stranger signing off yours, every capstone idea he had tried and failed to want, and which train might leave Sheffield station early enough on a Tuesday to put him on the Norfolk coast by one o'clock.
He packed up his things and went back to his dorm.
Most of the decisions Wifies made were like lightbulbs in cartoons: very sudden and very single. His decision to attend Sheffield in the first place had been like that. So had the all-nighter before his AP exams and his decision to block all his friends from high school. This decision was not like that. It felt like a debt, owed rather than chosen; a loan he had taken out the night he had stayed up reading cryptid forums until 2 AM, a night he would long regret.
He spent the better part of two days pretending that he wasn't thinking about it: the mental equivalent of holding your breath. He was still thinking about it every day. He went to his morning seminar and produced a full page of notes he didn't remember writing on a topic he couldn't have named an hour later. He ate lunch alone, which wasn't new, but he noticed for the first time that he was doing it, which was. Whenever anyone spoke to him (the boy who sat in front of him in the seminar, the woman at the dining hall register, his flatmate asking for the last of his milk), some separate process kept running underneath the conversation with embarrassing consistency, returning again and again to an address in Norfolk.
He had, that same term, been made to sit through an introductory psychology module he hadn't wanted to participate in and had therefore disrespected on principle. But from it he retained only one thing: intrusive thoughts. At the time he'd thought it unbelievable, the definitive reason why the whole subject was a fraud. Every thought you have, you control it; that's why it's a thought, isn't it?
Now he understood well. Humblingly so.
He turned to logistics, because logistics were something he knew how to solve. Sheffield to Norwich was the first leg and was easy enough: a straight line on the map that not even the terrible rail website could obscure. From Norwich he was meant to change onto a smaller line to Sheringham, which according to the timetable ran twice a day, though the site was formatted so poorly that he couldn't really confirm this was true. And Cley next the Sea, Wifies discovered, had no station at all. It was reachable only by a bus with the word Coasthopper printed across the side in a friendly, rounded font. The name itself was so cheery that Wifies snorted out loud, in his dorm room, at eleven at night, which humiliated him a little.
More than once in those two days, Wifies considered calling his mother. His thumb would hover over the little green icon, the screen dimming from his hesitation before Wifies would press the phone to his sternum and stare up at the ceiling instead. He knew with total confidence what she would say if he called her; he could produce her half of the conversation without dialing at all. She would ask if this was for school. He'd say something evasive like, you could say that. His mother's voice would climb up half an octave when she asked what exactly that was supposed to mean. And at that Wifies would go quiet, because the sentence—there's a man on the coast of England who thinks he's found a sea monster and I have not been able to stop thinking about him, so now I'm going to his house—was not a sentence he could say to his mother, or anyone at all.
If Wifies was being honest, that was the most humiliating part of this whole situation. Not the money, the two trains, the bus with the stupid name, or the risk, but just how stupid it sounded. Wifies had spent the last twenty years practicing to be the kind of person who didn't make people raise their eyebrows at dinner parties. Diligent. Unremarkable, but in a hard-won way that required effort to keep together. And yet here he was, doing the math on a two-train trip to a village that most maps didn't bother to name, all in the interest of sitting across a table from someone he knew exclusively through one very unhinged blog post and a signature reading yours. Some newly exposed nerve in him just wouldn't let it go.
But he had discovered a new nerve. That was just it. When he tried to remember the last time any part of him had reached out for something on his own, without being assigned to it through social convention, the answer unfortunately went back to primary school. Maybe an obsession with a dinosaur exhibit, he wasn't sure, before he'd conditioned himself to want things that were easy to explain to relatives at Christmas. He'd been going through the motions for years.
He thought again about the four lost capstone projects he'd tried and shed, and felt something close to physical recoil at the idea of becoming the person who let a thing go quiet for the fifth time. Because he was beginning to suspect, with the same sick, descending clarity he'd already applied to the near-certainty that he would, in fact, end up in Cley next the Sea, that he'd spent his whole life waiting to want something badly enough to give things up for it. He'd assumed it'd be something more respectable: a great love or a grand ambition worth the years it'd cost, something you'd say out loud at family parties and they would all nod in inspiration. He hadn't expected a stranger's blog post and a residential address in Norfolk. Something Wifies really, desperately wanted. How insane was he?
Fine. It was, he decided, lying in bed at the end of the second night of pretending otherwise, staring at a stretch of ceiling he'd already memorized, just a day trip. There and back within the same day. Or perhaps an overnight stop in Cley next the Sea, if need be. He would talk to Hummer for thirty minutes, ask his questions, thank the man for his time, and take the last Coasthopper back toward the station. The odds favored this being an anticlimactic trip: Hummer would turn out to be exactly as unremarkable in person as most intriguing internet strangers were (a little sad, a little lonely, and entirely harmless). His life would then resume its plan immediately after, albeit mildly enriched by a brief anecdote. And if the village was really as small as the tourist board made it seem, it would function a little like the introduction of an Agatha Christie story. Everyone would already know a stranger had come to see the man on Gullwatch Crescent, which meant that if anything happened to him, there'd be a whole village's worth of witnesses ready to say so. He would even tell his advisor, who could account for him if he never returned. Being an exchange student, he was sure Sheffield would worry enough to retrieve him, and England didn't even have the twenty-four-hour waiting period. That felt, if not quite safe, at least adjacent to safe.
What would actually be safe, of course, was not going at all.
He told his advisor the following Thursday, exactly one week after Hummer's reply had arrived. His advisor was in the green cardigan that day, the middle cardigan in his rotation of three.
"I've—er, I've found someone I think I should interview," Wifies said, standing in the doorway rather than sitting in a chair. He hadn't even scheduled an appointment. "For the project. A primary source. Sort of."
His advisor looked at Wifies up over his spectacles. "Sort of a primary source, or sort of an interview?"
"The second one, I think. He's got firsthand experience. With my... topic."
"Norfolk," Wifies said, to the room rather than to him. "It's not far. Just a day trip."
His advisor took a long, unhurried pull from his mug of instant coffee. "Well," he said finally, "I think that's a good place to start."
"Yeah," Wifies said. "It is."
He left the office a moment later and went back out into the corridor feeling as though he'd gotten away with something, though he couldn't have said what.
He sat down to draft his reply that same evening, cross-legged on his dorm bed with the laptop balanced on a pillow, and stared at the blinking cursor for an embarrassing length of time.
He wrote three lines and deleted two of them. He typed Hi Hummer and left it there long enough that the words stopped registering as words at all, just shapes; then he changed it to Hello, and then back to Hi, because Hello read like something a solicitor would open with, and he was fairly sure only one of the two of them was allowed to sound like that.
Hi,
October 28th works. I'll come to the address you sent. I'll get a train that day.
See you then,
Wifies.
He read it over twice and resisted, with what felt like genuine effort, the urge to add anything further. He removed any assurances, trying not to sound eager. He suspected, privately, that he was going to fail at that regardless of what the email said. Still, there was no reason to make it an obvious failure.
He hit send before he could reread it a third time, and then sat very still in the dark of his room, listening to the radiator tick through its cycle, waiting for something like regret to arrive.
What came instead was closer to excitement.
Wifies woke up and hoped it would rain.
If the sky cooperated, his sensible and recently overpowered half (the half that liked to make spreadsheets, the half that had decided to tell his advisor he was leaving) could finally overrule the newer, stranger half that had booked a 6:47 train to Norwich three days earlier without telling anyone. A rainy day would have been a reasonable excuse: trains canceled, replacement bus services, and it would all be over. He would have texted his advisor something appropriately regretful and gone back to bed with a clean conscience.
He checked his window at half past five, before his alarm had even gone off, and found the sky the color of dishwater left too long in the sink: its usual. No rain. Not even the threat of it. Just an ordinary South Yorkshire October morning, indifferent to the fact that anything in Wifies' life was supposed to be different today.
He'd packed the night before, sloppily, and now he was left to stare down at the results. It consisted of one canvas tote: a notebook, his phone charger, a protein bar he already knew he wouldn't eat, and the photograph from Hummer's article, folded into fourths so many times over the past weeks that the creases had gone soft and pale, the corners worn round like a coin carried in someone's pocket for years. He slid it into its own sandwich bag before putting it in the tote: a gesture that struck him, even as he did it, as faintly ridiculous. It was as if the photograph were something that needed to be preserved for evidentiary purposes, chain of custody and all, rather than a printout he'd made himself at the library for eleven pence a page.
He left at 6:20, giving himself twenty-five minutes for a walk that Google insisted took thirteen. He arrived at the station with about twelve minutes to spare and nothing to do with them, so he sat on a cold metal bench and watched a man in a hi-vis vest have an increasingly theatrical argument with a delivery driver about a parking space. His foot bounced the whole time, a relentless drumbeat against the pavement that he only noticed once a woman glanced over and made him stop.
The 6:47 to Norwich left, against all his expectations, exactly on time. Wifies had been so ready for a delay that when one didn't come, he spent the first ten minutes of the journey sitting in the wrong seat entirely. Finally, a small, apologetic woman wheeling a shopping trolley the size of a filing cabinet informed him, not unkindly, "You're in my seat, love, table twelve." He apologized his way across the aisle, his ears burning.
The ride to Norwich took just over two and a half hours, and he spent most of it watching the Midlands scroll past in shades of gray-green: field, field, field, a long stretch of pylons marching off toward a horizon that never quite resolved. Meanwhile, he did the thing he always did on trains and pretended he didn't: listening to strangers' conversations and building nonconsensual biographies out of the stories. Two seats up, a man in a tracksuit conducted a long, one-sided phone argument with someone he referred to only as "our kid," the subject being a fence, a dog, and the disputed question of whether the dog had escaped or been deliberately let out. Wifies' conclusion was that the person on the other line had done it on purpose.
He checked his phone twice during the ride, less to see the time than to confirm it was still moving forward at a normal rate, which it was: 8:15, then 9:40, the numbers ticking along with a patience he did not currently share. He felt a little dizzy.
Norwich station, when he finally stepped out onto the platform a little after 9:20, was smaller and shabbier than the name had suggested to him: faded Victorian brick and a WHSmith with shelves that looked half-abandoned. He had forty minutes before his connection, so he bought a sandwich he didn't especially want on the theory that doing one small, normal, hungry-person thing might counterbalance everything else about the day that wasn't normal at all. It worked, marginally.
The 10:02 to Sheringham was the train that only existed twice a day, the one the website had refused to confirm. Its actual, physical existence came as a genuine relief: two ancient carriages, the whole thing smelling unmistakably of wet dog and old diesel. It was a specifically British smell, the sort of thing that would never occur to an American train to smell like (not that American trains really existed). A retired couple in matching waterproof jackets sat a few rows up, deep in a dispute about a bird one of them swore had been a marsh harrier and the other insisted was just a plain old buzzard. It was a disagreement conducted with the low-grade, comfortable intensity of two people who had been disagreeing about small things for forty years and expected to keep doing so for forty more. Wifies felt a little jealous of them. A few seats further back, a teenager in a school uniform slept against the window with his mouth open, entirely unguarded, his whole slack, unconscious adolescence on display for a train carriage of nobody in particular. The picture was straight out of a tedious boarding-school book, and yet here, now, watching the actual boy rather than reading about a fictional one, it moved him in a way he didn't examine too closely.
He decided he should probably stop watching people. He did not stop watching people.
Somewhere around the third stop, a man sitting alone across the narrow aisle caught his eye and spoke without any preamble at all: "You get done up for anything nice, then?"
Wifies, startled into honesty, said, "Meeting a stranger. For a project. I'm a journalist."
"Ah," the man said, nodding slowly, as if a theory of his had just been confirmed. He was ruddy and weathered, the sort of outdoorsy that was beginning to go soft and gray at the edges. "Nobody comes out this way for a holiday no more. Could've seen that coming, mind, now the caravan park's shut up."
He said it without any particular grief, the way you'd report a time or a temperature. Then, after a silence long enough that Wifies assumed the conversation had ended on its own, he added: "Seals'll be out today, though. Good day for seals."
After that, the man turned back to the window and didn't speak again. Confused, Wifies followed suit.
The train reached Sheringham a little before 10:50 and deposited him onto a platform smaller still than Norwich's, with a single working ticket machine and the unmistakable, sudden smell of the sea: salt, and something colder underneath it, rot and mineral, nothing like the postcard version.
The Coasthopper stop, once Wifies reached it, turned out to be nothing more than a pole with a laminated timetable zip-tied to it, the ink gone soft and water-stained. Wifies squinted at the smudged Times New Roman for a good five minutes before giving up on doing the math in his head. Instead, he sat on a bench damp enough with mildew that he felt it through his jeans, even though it was midday.
The bus arrived roughly twenty minutes later, looking unmistakably like a decommissioned American prison bus that had wandered several thousand miles off course. The driver was around fifty, wearing glasses a size too small for her face, her hair defying the damp in every direction at once. She greeted every single passenger by name as they boarded—Good day to you, Pam. How are those kids, Trevor?—a repeated liturgy for a surprising number of bus riders who were all around her age and had all apparently known her for eons. When Wifies stepped up, she paused with her hand still on the fare box, looked at him for one long, assessing second over the top of her glasses, and said, "You're not from here."
Wifies shook his head.
She only nodded, unbothered, and waved him aboard without asking for a ticket at all.
The road out of Sheringham ran in slow, unhurried curves along the coastline, hedgerows breaking every so often to give a sudden, enormous view of the sea. The water was flat and pewter-colored, the exact same gray as the sky above, so that the difference between the clouds and the sea was just one large smear on the horizon. Somewhere in that stretch of road, the tight, twisting dread that had been sitting behind his ribs the whole day finally began to loosen. He felt like a kid going to Disneyland all of a sudden, tapping his foot against the bus floor.
Cley next the Sea began as a smatter of flint cottages and then the windmill: the exact windmill from the website, though grayer in person, less flattering without whatever hour of whatever perfect day the photographer had chosen. The village really was as small as it had looked online, small enough that the bus was already slowing again barely a minute after the windmill came into view. The driver called out, not his name, since she'd never asked it, but simply, "This is you, love, isn't it," in a tone that made clear it wasn't really a question.
He stepped down onto a narrow grass verge at what his phone told him, with a small blue clock icon and no further comment, was 11:34 in the morning.
Gullwatch Crescent, apparently, was not visible from here. He'd have to walk the rest of it.