The Rushing Waves, by Chloe Clark

"David’s father had worked on submarines, far under the weight of the water, but he had always said that even in the deep there was light... David thought that the same could not be said of space."

There was something about this Chloe Clark that immediately grabbed me, as soon as I started reading it in the submission queue. Like, within-the-first-paragraph immediately. It sets up this deep sea/outer space dichotomy that hooked me, made me curious, and all with this voice that felt confident and propulsive, assuring me it knew what it was doing while also pushing me forward to the next paragraph, the next section, sucking me up and into its narrative and propelling me forward the way I love a short story that is working can.

And then, too, is the art from Pancho Muñoz! I never really draw specific attention to the art here in these intros, but holy wow, as soon as I opened up the files Pancho gave me, I fell in love just as immediately as I had Chloe’s story, and also they brought the story alive for me and added even a whole nother level.

Incredibly excited to get to share “The Rushing Waves” today!

—Aaron Burch

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David’s father had worked on submarines, far under the weight of the water, but he had always said that even in the deep there was light. Not light in the sense of actual light, but light in the way that he knew how water was filled with so much that was living. David thought that the same could not be said of space. The only thing in the Out seemed to be the absence of life, of light. He’d wanted so much to find beauty in that.

He never felt this way on the station. It was too large, too filled with the movement of people, to ever get lost in a moment of silence staring into the Out. Life on the station felt condensed to the next thing after the next thing. Just bodies with tasks to do, things to get done. When he had decided to work in space, he’d dreamed of how peaceful it would be, of being part of something infinite. But the reality was that it was mostly paperwork and research, the same everyday doldrums he’d have found in an office. At least it wasn’t empty.

Why had he signed up for the mission, then? Maybe, simply because he was one of the people who’d heard the distress call. The screams followed by silence and then something else—an eerie something that could only be described as close to singing, but not singing that any human had ever heard.

“David?” Katrine spoke from somewhere behind him. She was the mission’s medical officer and someone whom David had never met before the mission’s crew was introduced to one another. He sometimes questioned how, with a population of only a few hundred, he didn’t know everyone on the space station by sight. It was smaller than a small town.

He turned away from the window. “Yeah?”

“You do that so often. What do you look for out there?” Katrine stepped closer, her eyes on the window, the darkness.

He shrugged. He had never really been looking out, just letting his mind wander in circles. “I think I’m mostly just staring into space.”

Katrine laughed and it took David a second to realize why what he had said was funny. “You know what they say, though, David, about staring into the abyss?”

David shook his head. He didn’t know what they said, but Katrine had already turned to leave and didn’t see his look of confusion.

*

David’s father used to tell him about the sea. David dreamed of the waves at night—of jellyfish, sharks, squids with long tentacles. They weren’t nightmares, though. Not at first. Not until after his father never returned and David’s mother moved them far inland.

*

David listened to the distress call again. It had started with a beacon. Just the SOS code blipped out repeatedly from a ship called BNSi. The station control room had eventually picked up the last message that had been sent out.

“Please, please, god. Please hurry.” A woman’s voice. When they had gone through the ship log data embedded in the distress call, it revealed that there were three female crew members; the voice could have been any of them. They’d each looked almost generic. One woman with shoulder-length blonde hair, two brunettes, all three looking at the camera with the exact same expression. The men had been the same. Maybe no one looks specific until you know them.

Then had come the sound of screaming from somewhere behind the woman. Her voice had dropped to a whisper. “Please, please, please.”

The “pleases” repeated into a mash of nonsense sounds. Then the singing. Or whatever it was. High-pitched and ethereal. It should have been beautiful but, in the hush between screams the sound seemed to crawl from the speakers, cold and wet it clung to David. He had the irrational thought that it wanted to curl up inside of him, find a home for itself.

David wondered if the woman sending the message was still alive. What could have happened on the ship? A routine exploratory ship—BNS types were usually sent out from stations to do local sorts of recon and evaluation expeditions.

He pressed repeat and the message played again.

“David, something’s happened,” his mother had said, shaking him from sleep with her hands on his shoulders.

He’d been dreaming of the sea, of shapes moving in the water. In a way, he awoke already knowing that something was about to change.

“Something with the sub. I don’t know yet. They won’t give me any information.” His mother’s voice shook and she didn’t take breaths between her sentences. It all sounded like one long, horrific word.

David thought of his father way down at the bottom of the sea. David stared at his mother, her eyes wild with fear, and he wanted to ask her to find a map and point out exactly where his father was. There was so much water. How did you find someone under all of it?

*

“We have visuals on BNSi,” the mission captain, Andrew, announced. The crew sat around a small table. “Rescue mission protocol states that two of us must remain aboard our ship. That leaves four of us to embark on BNSi. Obviously, Katrine, as our medical officer, and myself will be going aboard. Stacey, as our pilot, will be staying with our ship. Who else will go onboard?”

Darren, one of the other volunteers, raised his hand. David did as well, though, if he’d been asked, he’d never have been able to explain why. Just a flash of water across his vision, a shape.  He could feel the other volunteer, Paula, relax in her seat beside him. There was one thing to volunteer for the mission, another to actually go aboard the ship where those sounds had come from.

“We’ll prepare to board in T-minus sixty minutes. Be ready.”

David walked back to the sleeping room. What had he just done? He could hear the singing in his head.

He looked at the window, into the Out. Such darkness coming in like waves. And then he saw it, floating in the black. The BNSi gleamed silvery white, looking so small amidst the Out. It was hard to think about what a speck everything was when encompassed by so much endlessness.

No one ever knew what exactly went wrong on the submarine. There had been survivors, an escape vessel of some sort that fit a couple of people inside. But the survivors all claimed some sort of amnesia. It was possible, experts said, the collective trauma had done something to their memories.

David’s father was not one of the survivors.

There was no way to recover the body. What happened to a body enclosed in a submarine? Were the laws of decomposition the same? Or was it like a sort of stasis and David’s father was trapped in time, unchanging, until someone found him and set his body free?

David suited up. He watched the others, looking for the signs of nervousness in them that he felt in himself. Katrine slipped her helmet on and he watched her face disappear beneath the visor.

“Are you ready, David?” she asked.

He nodded. “I think so. I’ve never done a rescue before. Have you?”

She shook her head. “Only in practice. Never in reality. I imagine that the practice was nothing like it actually will be.”

“What do you think we’ll find?”

Katrine faced him, but under her visor she may have had any sort of expression. “Survivors, I hope.”

*

The BNSi was silent. The main lights malfunctioned, flickering in and out in different shades of brightness. They all had flash beams equipped but the steady lights did little to combat the dizzying effect of the flickering ones.

One of the doors was open, leading into the sleeping quarters. A man’s body was on the floor. David stepped into the room, walking closer to the body. He heard Andrew say something, but didn’t take the words in.

The man’s face was turned to the wall. His mouth was open and something leaked out. A silvery liquid that looked almost like mercury.

“Shit, there might be some sort of contaminant at work.” Katrine said from beside him, having also stepped inside to look closer.

“It looks like his soul is coming out,” David said. He hadn’t meant to say it aloud.

The silver liquid formed a pool in the shape of a cloud. They both backed out of the room.

“I think we should be safe, since we’re breathing through our masks, but I don’t think we should carry anything back on our ship without a decontamination process,” Katrine told the group.

“Have you seen something like this before?” Andrew asked.

Katrine shook her head, slowly, frowning as if considering something. “No, not exactly like this. No.”

They walked on. Their footsteps, still, the only sound on the ship. They had come to the control room. Someone sat at the computers. A woman, blonde hair pulled back in a sleek ponytail.

“Officer?” Andrew spoke.

The woman did not turn.

“Officer? We heard your distress call. We’re here to help. Please acknowledge.”

The woman did not turn. Katrine stepped forward, walking to the woman, and touched her on the shoulder. The woman fell from the chair, like a ragdoll.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Darren yelled, staring at the woman’s now-revealed face. Her eyes were missing. It didn’t look like they had been removed, but rather as if they had never existed in the first place—perfect, emptied shell-like spaces. Her expressionless face mirroring her crew photo. Silvery liquid glistened on her skin.

David was in his twenties when he found a survivor from his father’s crew. Alyssa Harping. She’d been a medic aboard the submarine and didn’t live that far from where he was going to university. They met at a café.

“David?” she’d asked when she saw him. She didn’t look at anyone else, seeming to zero in on him though she’d never met him. He nodded, surprised. “You look a lot like your Dad.”

“My mom says that too,” he replied.

Alyssa sat down across from him. “I don’t really remember anything about it. You’ve probably heard that about the survivors?”

“Yeah, but, is there anything?” he asked.

Alyssa looked off into the distance; her response was a long time coming. “I can’t say this is anything true or real. It’s just something that I sometimes dream about.”

She paused again and he felt the need to prompt her. “Yes?”

“Sometimes I dream that I’m back down there and there is something on the sub with us. A shadow where there should be no shadow. As if someone is standing there but there isn’t anyone standing there? I dream it so much that I wonder if it isn’t some sort of memory, but what kind of memory could it be?”

“A shadow?”

“A shadow. That’s all I have. I’m sorry, David. I wish there was more, but there’s just an empty space where there should be memories. It’s like someone climbed into my head and scooped out everything. Your father was a good man. I’m sure whatever happened down there, he died being brave, helping someone.”

*

They found most of the crew members. All in states of mysterious death, though none as bad as the eyeless woman. There was nothing to reveal what had happened. They downloaded the ship’s data and prepared to disembark. Then a sound came. A sound like singing. The sound from the distress call.

“Where is it coming from?” Darren asked, looking around terrified.

It seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.

Katrine went still. “It sounds like whale song, almost.”

And it did, David realized. It sounded like a whale in distress, calling out through the oceans. Then the pitch went higher. And higher. It rang through his skull. He needed to block it out. The sound made his skull vibrate.

David used to dream of his father. Of his father standing on a beach at night, facing the ocean.

David walked up to his father. “Dad?”

His father would turn to him. He was always smiling. “The water’s so endless, David. Being a part of it is like being a part of eternity.”

Then his father walked into the ocean, until he disappeared beneath the waves.

*

The singing stopped.

“We need to get out of here,” Andrew said, speaking what all of them knew to be true.

They disembarked, leaving behind the bodies and the ship. They’d send a ship back, a ship equipped to deal with the decontamination. The bodies would not float in space forever.

David took off his suit and sat down on the ground, breathing in the safety of their own ship. His hands shook. He heard the song still in his head, ricocheting through his mind. Would he be able to hear it forever? Recall it, even, in his sleep?

It took three days to return to their station. David stared out the windows as they neared it. He was ready to see the safety of what he thought of as home. But the station was not there. Or it was not there as it had been. It was ruined, broken, destroyed.

Andrew sent a message in. No response. He sent a distress call out.

A voice came over the monitor. “Repeat, please. Did you say you’re from Station Ellipto?”

“Yes, we’re a rescue vessel. We were out on a mission. We’re ship BNNi.”

“Jesus, well you’re one lucky damn rescue crew. Ellipto suffered a malfunction in one of the main ports of some sort. There was an explosion. We’re listing no survivors. We didn’t know there was a crew out. Do you have the resources to reach us? Or should we send someone to bring you in?” The voice was practical. Not even considering the emotional nature of the message they had just dispatched. Ellipto had been their home. Smaller than a small town.

“We…We have the resources to reach you,” Andrew said, voice faltering.

David used to dream of his father. Of his father standing on a beach at night, facing the ocean. “The water’s so endless, David. Being a part of it is like being a part of eternity.”

Years later, back on Earth and working as a researcher for the stations, David found himself still dreaming often of the BNSi. The vessel had never been recovered, lost in the mess of disaster. Researching it later, he’d been unable to find a ship even with the name BNSi logged in any of the systems, no way to notify the crews’ families. He wondered if the mission was meant to have been out there at all.

Sometimes he still woke with the song playing in his head.

At an Oceanic museum, supervising a field trip for his daughter, he bumped into Katrine. She had aged so much. Had it only been a decade?

“David, how have you been?” she asked.

“Good, good. And yourself?”

“As fine as can be.”

David’s daughter looked at Katrine and said, “My grandfather went into the ocean and my daddy went into space.”

Katrine smiled. “I was in space, too. That’s how I know your Daddy. Do you want to go into space or into the sea?”

His daughter thought for a moment. “The sea. I like whales.”

“Whales are beautiful,” Katrine replied.

His daughter nodded, solemnly. “And they sing. Sometimes they sing warnings, you know. Of dangers in the deep.”

A shadow passed over Katrine’s face. “Yes, sometimes they do.”

“But, you know, they also just sing sometimes. It’s not only bad things they sing about.”

David watched Katrine’s face, wondering if she heard the song still, too.

“Is that so, dear?” she asked.

David’s gaze drifted towards an aquarium. It glowed from some internal lighting that had been rigged up. He heard his daughter reply, “oh, yes, they sometimes call out just to let each other know that there are strangers out in the deep. To not be afraid, because they aren’t alone.”

STORY:
Chloe N. Clark is the author of Collective Gravities, Patterns of Orbit, and more. She is a founding co-EIC of Cotton Xenomorph.

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ART:
Pancho Muñoz, or @greenpotion, is a mexican artist said to be born from the ashes of a cursed playstation 1 controller. 

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Next Tuesday, we’ll feature an interview with Chloe Clark about this story.

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