Chapter Text
There are many versions of this story. Which one have you heard? Do the children die in your version? Whose version is definitive? Fables, myths, and fairy tales, told so many times not even the bones of the story remain the same. The teller decides. A spell, an incantation, a cake recipe. There is a bomb inside you. I can say that. It might be true but it might not be definitive. The Dalai Lama says we are born in bliss and Jesus says we are born in sin. Who are you going to believe?
- Richard Siken
It was still a long time yet before Wifies would ever hear the name Hummer, or rather, read it. And it was an even longer time before he would come to realize that he had been looking for him, not anything more or less, since the very day he first crossed the gray channel into England.
If he had known, in that damp autumn he had arrived, what the coming year would eventually cost him, he liked to think he might have stayed home. He would have gone to the community college there instead, living a dull, predictable life writing local obituaries, keeping an apartment near his parents' house. The whole business of the Leviathan would have been left alone to rot in the dark, undisturbed beneath the salt and the silt of Hummer's old ship. Maybe Hummer would have given up, without Wifies’ clumsy interference, learning to leave well enough alone in his damp study in Cley-next-the-Sea. Or maybe the man would have simply found some other poor soul to drown.
But Wifies only liked to think it. There was a reason he could never dedicate much time to those thoughts before they washed off his mind. It was a fanciful yet foolish ideal, much like the way people imagine parallel worlds where they are sharper, colder, braver, while secretly knowing that their human flaws: stubbornness, morbid curiosity, and a fear of being wrong, would always get in the way. Wifies had wanted to be where he had ended up, and he had gotten what he knew he would in the end. Hadn't he?
Though Wifies now knew, with the clarity of hindsight, that the real reason he had come to the University of Sheffield was to find something to quell said human flaws. But when he had first arrived he had felt quite differently.
Back then, he had had good, sensible reasons. He told himself, and anyone who asked, that he'd wanted to associate himself with people who didn't like their tea with sugar, their skin with fake tanning gel or their schools with poor literacy rates for once. What he wanted was tall halls of soot-stained bricks and dirty glass windows, of buildings constructed before the seventeenth century, green and gray moors that looked better in the background of photographs than the flat, beige Midwestern plains yawning on for a dull, safe infinity.
He also wanted free healthcare.
Not only did Wifies have good, sensible reasons, he also had a meticulous plan for what to do upon his arrival. He would treat his trip as an interval, a detached parenthesis in an otherwise continually unremarkable life. He would read widely, work steadily, and after his first year, he would return home for the summer carrying a final capstone project so obviously and unimpeachably impressive that his family would finally believe his trip had been worth the transatlantic ticket. And maybe, just maybe, they would give him the pat on the back and the freedom never to return home again. To stay in England, to read wider and work steadier, and become something remarkable, for once.
He had vaguely pictured himself busily working away at this mysterious project in a high-arched library alongside a teetering stack of calfskin-bound books, a project on something that would garner him a small measure of academic respect, get him transferred to somewhere even prettier and older than Sheffield. This magical project would be about something safe and defensible, like medieval wool trade routes, nineteenth-century enclosure acts, or something else dry enough to photograph well on a CV. Wifies had no picture in his mind of what would actually happen, or what his project would actually entail. In fact, there was not a single ugly picture in his mind regarding what this project might become, which was perhaps his first mistake, though there would be many months before he considered it a mistake at all.
The first weeks of his time in England were the ones he remembered the least. The endless drizzle and the mandatory induction lectures had blended together into a balmy gray paste in his head. It was all just damp air and pounds of raw information he absorbed without retaining, his eyes glazed over, and his chin propped heavily on his left hand while professors spoke in British accents that took him weeks to parse for any actual meaning.
What the hell is a drawing pin, and where am I supposed to get my group project partner one?
The loneliness of it was what remained the clearest in his head. Eating alone in a cavernous dining hall that wasn't designed for anyone solitary to even step foot in, considering the sheer number of round tables containing social circles large enough to drag over extra chairs by the dozens, their laughter echoing off and around the high timber ceilings.
He wasn't entirely friendless, of course, but his companions were creatures of sheer proximity and mutual displacement. Other foreign exchange students, for the most part. A perpetually miserable Canadian and a twitchy, caffeine-addicted Chinese kid were about his only company for those initial weeks, and what sparse company it was. Everyone in that small circle knew there was a ticking expiration date stamped on the bottom of their working friendship. And he'd stopped hanging out with them by the time this story starts, anyway.
He wasn't unhappy, though. Looking back, making the opening part of such a story as this into a bleak, melodramatic beginning would be so easy. But he wanted to make it clear that at no point was he genuinely miserable during his first semester. His university was nice to look at, the city was pleasant, and he liked the never-ending loom of the fog against the valley. He was in a waiting stage, really, though he didn't know it then. Like waiting for a train he didn't know the schedule for, entirely unaware that he was waiting at all.
By October, he had already burned through four capstone ideas. Medieval trade routes had been a brief fluke; he was never truly a history person, and was unable to care about the price of sheepskins in fourteenth-century York. Enclosure acts died a little slower, but still with remarkable speed, lost somewhere in the second week of looking for primary sources, when he discovered that his aesthetic appetite for nice-looking covers and bookworm-eaten pages was an entirely different animal from his appetite for parliamentary land grabs.
Next up was something on postwar municipal planning—a visiting lecturer had mentioned the subject admiringly once during a damp Tuesday seminar, and Wifies had seized onto the man's enthusiasm and funny voice instead of the intrigue topic itself. Obviously, that one didn't last either. It expired even faster than the enclosure acts. There was a fourth idea, too, something to do with regional dialect erosion in London, that he drifted in and out of without so much as a spark of genuine interest.
His advisor, who was a tired, silver-haired man with an asymmetrical mustache who wore the same three threadbare cardigans in a very strict rotation, took this parade of abandoned projects with a surprising, almost saintly patience unique to Wifies.
"While I respect all of your potential choices, Wifies, you never seem to have any real anchor in them," the man had said one afternoon over a cup of instant coffee that smelled distractingly strong as chicory. "It is supposed to be a passion project, after all."
Wifies had only shrugged at that, staring past the advisor's shoulder at the gray rain streaking the leaded window panes. "I am passionate. For about two weeks."
The advisor said nothing to that, his expression flat behind his little spectacles, so Wifies offered a standard, polite, thankful comment as he stood up and smoothed down his sweater to leave the office. It was only much later that he realized how precisely, how infuriatingly correct that old man had been.
Maybe there is an alternate version of this story where it ends right here, or perhaps a single paragraph from now. A version where Wifies simply continues to fail at pursuing any single topic consistently until he goes back, out of sheer intellectual exhaustion, to a safe, dusty subject he’d already begun and sloppily finishes it. Because he was fundamentally a good student, he could have scrounged it into something that was still obviously and unimpeachably important, and his life would have unfolded exactly as he had expected it to, despite this minor hiccup. None of what follows—none of the late nights, the salt-encrusted archives, the way Hummer’s name would eventually taste in his mouth—would ever happen to him.
He thinks about that version sometimes. Not often, but not never.
What actually happened to him was a lot smaller, quieter, and stranger than any single dramatic turning point. It wasn't the neat end of the first act of a thrilling film, and it wasn't the rising action of a proper gothic novel. In retrospect, it was more like how real life actually changes—though this remains the only time he has ever experienced change on this magnitude. It was not a massive door swinging open all at once, but rather the imperceptible shift of a series of doors all left slightly ajar, so that a man might walk through half a dozen of them before he realizes he is no longer in the room he started in.
Wifies had developed a specific habit that autumn. It was half born out of genuine, nagging curiosity and half the child of chronic procrastination. The habit consisted of long, post-midnight searches through obscure internet forums on the dim edges of folklore and local history—the kind of digital detritus built out of the simple human need to believe that there must be something bigger, darker, and more ancient lurking just beneath that flooded cellar, or behind that missing dog's disappearance, or in the unexplained flash on the sea's surface. None of it was ever remotely related to anything he was supposed to be researching, though he lied to himself about that notion with impressive regularity. By late October, he was spending more hours of his life scrolling through archived Reddit threads and digitized regional gazettes than he was reading his assigned texts.
It was in the middle of one of these late evenings, one distinguished by a flat, unyielding gray sky outside his dorm window, that he found himself several deep link-clicks into a contentious discussion about English coastal cryptids—the sort of fringe internet archaeology he would normally have closed out of sheer academic embarrassment if anyone had walked behind his desk.
Except this time, he didn't close the tab.
There was something undeniably magnetic about this particular thread. It was excruciatingly long, deeply contentious, and petty, the digital discourse driven by an even split of fanatic believers who claimed to have seen things in the tide pools and cynical skeptics who had stumbled in purely to mock them. The words were blending together in Wifies' head with the terrifying feverish cadence that was characteristic of four o'clock in the morning rather than the afternoon Wifies was stewing in currently. Yet, it was undeniably one of the most intriguing out of the internet rabbit holes he had stumbled into since arriving in the UK.
These people, while arguing viciously as they went, had somehow built an uncomfortably impressive evidentiary case by the end of the thread. There were grainy photographs cross-referenced with century-old tide tables from the North Yorkshire coast. There were specific dates, cited and fiercely disputed. There was a shadow of methodology, just the merest and most grotesque glimpses of actual archival tracking that he hadn't seen in the dark depths of shitty internet forums before. This strange, obsessive rigor was completely wasted on something that could, under no circumstances: be real or possess any scientific merit.
And yet, he just kept scrolling. He kept reading paragraph after paragraph of digitized newspaper clippings and marine logs until the digital clock in the corner of his monitor finally flipped from P.M. to A.M., and he could hear the muffled cooing of collared doves waking him up outside his single-pane window.
Another thing he would like to say, looking back across the wreckage of the year, is that he recognized the exact moment the trap sprang shut on him—that he knew what was coming when he sat there, three instant coffees deep into a Google Scholar search query simply entitled: The Leviathan of the North Sea.
But he didn't recognize it at all. All he knew, as his eyes burned and his shoulders ached from the drafty room and the lack of sleep, was that he was finally interested in something. Interested in a way he didn't think he had been in days, weeks, months, or perhaps even years.
He finally closed his laptop lid with a soft thud and laid back on his stiff, narrow dorm bed, staring up at the popcorn texture of the ceiling where the ghostly blue afterimage of the Reddit font still seemed to hover. It was a strange, illicit satisfaction—the quiet thrill of having done something utterly unproductive and not about to feel a single ounce of regret for it.
He could always look into it with a clearer head tomorrow, he told himself, when he eventually rolled out of bed past noon. Maybe he could even mention it to his advisor as a dry joke, turning it into a private, sardonic joy before forcing himself back onto a more sensible, career-friendly subject.
At that point, he didn't know enough about himself—or about the man waiting at the end of the line—to realize he was lying.
He did, eventually, look into it with a clearer head. Waking past noon, he brewed a cup of instant coffee that tasted like a minor punishment and went back to the screen. It was an idle pursuit born of low-stakes leftover conviction: what else was there to do, aside from things he didn't want to?
The Leviathan, as it turned out, was not one story on one massive forum, but rather several, badly stitched together over decades by people who had never spoken to one another. There was a fisherman's log from the fifties, nearly illegible, transcribed onto an older forum from 2009. There were a handful of grainy photographs from the seventies and eighties—images of the Loch Ness monster ilk—blurry, potentially a wave, a trick of the light, or other examples of the human eye's genius for making something of nothing. More recently, there was a smattering of long, passionate, badly edited blog posts and amateur video essays. Wanting to be believed greatly reduces your odds of being believed at all, if Wifies knew anything.
Wifies continued his reading, now clear-headed, detached, and feeling slightly superior.
He continued for three days. It was no longer a distraction, but something closer to a hobby. He had made a spreadsheet—because of course he had—with columns for the date, primary source quality, location, and a final column named credibility. He rated the potential from one to five, usually docking points for tone and pictures. The average number hovered around a two.
The tone was what made him stop when he reached Hummer's post.
It was a Tuesday when he found the article—one of the few details he remembers with specificity about that autumn, which might say something about him. Hosted on a personal site featuring an ancient decade of internet header fonts, he had already braced himself for something unbearable when he clicked. The piece was titled, making him snort aloud, What You're Doing Wrong: The Search for the Leviathan. Titles of that variety usually earned a one in his credibility column and an immediate closed tab.
He didn't close this one.
Skimming it, the prose caught his attention. It held him past his intended thirty seconds. It had a distinct voice for once, which was more uncommon than you might think. This far into his search, Wifies had seen the same few claims repeated without personality or attachment. This was different. If he was being honest with himself, it was a little insufferable. It was snide, assuming all readers agreed with its statements, and entirely impatient with anyone reading it as their first exposure to the Leviathan. It was almost condescending, a texture missing from everything else he had read so far.
The author had signed only with a tiny username: Hummer. His profile picture showed a foggy dock over a swirling navy sea. Wifies clicked onto his page distractedly. He had last logged in when he wrote the post in 2022, and his bio read simply, Norfolk Coast.
Wifies opened a separate tab and looked up the town.
He wasn't sure what compelled him to stalk this Hummer person. Maybe it was the dwindling supply of blogs left to dig through, or maybe this was simply the most interesting user he had found yet. He still wasn't sure.
The seaside Hummer inhabited looked about how Wifies expected: beige and gray, full of Brighton-style cities or gull-loud, faintly abandoned villages. It looked like the sort of place someone who wrote like Hummer would live. Wifies cut back to the article. He hadn't finished it; he had to reread the final paragraph more than once before it stuck:
Of course, I knew what it was. I had read about it online, and I was looking for it. The Leviathan. I can't say for sure that I saw it, but I swear, something caught my eye. A tail darting through strands of kelp. An eye peeking out from under the waves. I know the Leviathan is real. Everyone else is going about it wrong. If you want my help finding it, email me. I don't respond to dms.
He ended up reading that passage four separate times. He could contact Hummer. He actually could. Though that suggestion wasn't the only thing that snagged him. It was the lack of rigor in the argument—just raw feelings, a clear sign that Hummer genuinely believed in this creature. Everyone else is going about it wrong. Wifies, who had spent three days building a spreadsheet out of boredom to prove essentially the same point about everyone else out of an egotistical spur, felt a sudden, reluctant kinship with Hummer.
Then, below the passage, there was a photograph.
It was small and low-resolution, captioned only with a date and coordinates placing it about five miles off the coast Wifies had been Google Maps-ing. It showed water—mostly the flat, pewter shade of a cold sea on an overcast day—and near the center, a shape breaking the waves. Or maybe not a shape at all, just a shadow, a sea creature, or nothing. At first glance, it was unremarkable, the exact kind of photograph that had cost other posts points in Wifies' spreadsheet because it proved nothing.
Yet, at first glance, Wifies didn't distrust it.
It was only on the third or fourth look—he couldn't explain why, save for the same inexplicable attention he had given the article and the Norfolk Coast—that something started to bother him. It wasn't the ambiguous shape floating above the water, but some small detail in the corner that kept drawing his gaze. A light coming from the wrong direction, maybe. He couldn't be sure. He just kept looking right there, in the bottom left corner, not entirely sure why. He closed the laptop, lay back in bed, and swore he would look at Hummer and his article with a clear head tomorrow. He swore it.
Wifies did not look at it again with a clear head the next day. The next time he looked at it was within the hour. He reopened his laptop before he had even properly settled back into bed, the guilt of his self-made promise already gone by the time he was typing in Hummer's username again.
Nothing new had magically appeared, to his great displeasure. A dead account, a dead-looking article, a bio reading simply: Norfolk Coast. No email listed anywhere he could find, no contact page, nothing so convenient as a mailto link sitting near the bottom of the post.
Wifies had to reread the article for a fifth time before he found what he was looking for. It was buried in a single throwaway sentence near the top that he had skimmed past on the first four reads because it seemed irrelevant—an oddly formatted email address, as if the author were trying with great deliberance keep bots astray.
He copied it down on the edge of a notebook. A notebook with pages full of notes on more important things he could be spending his time on.
Wifies spent longer on the email than its final length would suggest. This, too, should surprise no one who knew him. He drafted something very long first, thoroughly laying out his credentials, his capstone, and a paragraph on his methodology. After reading it over, he decided anyone sane—though he couldn't guarantee Hummer was—would delete it. He deleted his first effort and tried again. His second go-around had the opposite issue: it was too short, the brevity a leaking sign of nerves he couldn't afford to expose.
Before his third attempt, he thought, deliriously, how stupid he was being. If the article really was four years old, the odds that this Hummer person would reply were next to none.
Then he kept writing.
The attempt he chose was the middle ground. Before sending it, he went over it so many times his brain began hallucinating typos and grammar issues that weren't there until the text looked green and hard to read. Wifies decided to send it before he spontaneously developed dyslexia.
Hi!
I came across your report about the Leviathan from a few years ago and was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about it for a journalism project I'm making on the Leviathan.
If you have around thirty minutes or so sometime in the next few weeks to call, I would really appreciate it!
Let me know,
Best, Wifies
He couldn't resist the urge to read it one more time before sending. He hoped it was a perfectly reasonable email—something any other journalism student might send to a primary source—and that there was no real explanation for why his hand lingered over the trackpad for as long as it did.
Then there was nothing to do but wait.
Wifies was bad at waiting. Over the course of the long autumn, he had discovered he lacked the capability to simply sit and let a stretch of time end. The list-making part of his brain—or rather, the spreadsheet-making part—always demanded he catalog the time so it wasn't a "waste," even if it was something useless. He had started this whole Leviathan mess by looking for something to fill the dead air while searching for a new project idea.
He shoved the word project out of his mind. He had no real solution to that issue and didn't want to think about it anymore.
So, as he waited for Hummer—a name he was privately treating as a hypothetical fiction, imagining how a ghost line might pick up—he did the only thing he could. He kept reading.
He told himself he was continuing his hobby, rather than waiting for a reply. Because, come on, the concept that Hummer would reply at all was absurd. And even if this was just a way to pass the time, it wouldn't hurt to have more information for that thirty-minute call of his dreams.
Wifies went back through the forum threads, video essays, and fisherman's logs, hunting for anything that might corroborate or contradict Hummer. What he found only raised his opinion of Hummer's mediocre piece. Maybe he had returned to research hoping to prove Hummer was just as stupid as the rest, to justify why he had fixated on him at all.
Instead, his interest only worsened.
Everything he saw was bad. Unimpressed had been his primary emotion since starting this mess, only briefly interrupted by Hummer, and now the feeling was back. There was a man in Grimsby who had spent a decade insisting the Leviathan was a misidentified basking shark, producing hundreds of pages of hostile blog posts that had almost nothing to do with sharks and everything to do with a 2011 fallout with a rival researcher slash ex-boyfriend. There was a cluster of posts tracing the Leviathan back to Old Testament readings in a way that left Wifies, a non-religious person himself, entirely stupefied. There was a YouTube channel with forty videos and eleven subscribers, each one the platform's required minimum length, which Wifies watched at double speed, regretting the sixty-six hours of life he had lost using them as podcasts.
Then, past two in the morning on the third day of waiting, listening to a grizzled old man's audio in his headphones, he stumbled upon another article that made him stop.
Instead of an article, it was a personal essay hosted on a website that lent academic weight to whatever it published via an aesthetic username and strange font colors. The author described, with visceral sensory detail, diving off the Lincolnshire coast one September and finding the water full of flecks of gold. And then, with no transition Wifies could explain, being somewhere else entirely—an ethereal plane, not a part of the sea. It possessed the same flat confidence he had read in Hummer, except here it didn't read as entertaining or interesting; it read as completely unwell.
He closed the tab. He didn't finish the essay, though he thought about it more than the rest of his recent reading. In the nauseated quiet that followed, Wifies decided this was enough. This time, it had finality. He had a spreadsheet full of ones, twos, and a single generous four; an email sent to a man likely no less unwell than the gold-flecks person; and a capstone deadline that wouldn't extend itself for his curiosity and stupidity. He would tell his advisor that Monday—he swore it—that he had landed on the safety of postwar municipal planning, and he would let the Leviathan, Hummer, and the Norfolk coast settle into the indifferent archive of the internet. It was never his problem anyway.
Hummer didn't magically answer him the next day. Or the day he told his advisor what his project would really be about. Or two days later. Or the day after that. But Wifies, possessing the self-restraint of a cocaine addict, didn't stop checking his email even after starting his real project. He checked it so frequently he would have been embarrassed to admit it—checking for a response from a manic internet conspiracy theorist the way other freshman year students might check for a text from a girl. His inbox remained empty save for an overdue library notice and the University of Sheffield's monthly newsletter. The more days passed, the more he convinced himself the detour was over. He moved his spreadsheet to the trash. Maybe he could tell someone at those parties he'd been avoiding that he'd nearly wasted a semester on a fictional sea monster; that would be relatable and interesting, wouldn't it?
By then, he had no way of knowing that Hummer was experiencing the exact same dilemma. That he had read the email thirty minutes after it was sent. That he had, in fact, read it a dozen times over, the way a man might read a letter he had waited a lifetime to receive, unable to respond too quickly—until, after much deliberation, he finally did, right when Wifies considered throwing in the towel.