When my mom drowned, people said it was an accident. “A freak wave,” they called it. But the ocean doesn’t take people by accident, not like that. I used to dream about her, standing knee deep in the black water near the cliffs, her hair floating around her face like seaweed. She’d be singing, soft and low, and behind her, I could always hear others, voices humming beneath the surface, hundreds of them. I’d wake up choking on salt.
After the funeral, my dad decided we needed a “change of scenery.” So we packed up and moved to Wicklow Bay, the same fog-choked coastal town where mom grew up, the same one she’d sworn she’d never return to. The first thing I noticed was how quiet it was. No one smiled. Windows were boarded up even on the houses where people still lived. And always, always, the fog. It rolled in off the sea and never left, so thick it blurred the edges of everything.
The locals didn’t talk much, but when they did, their voices carried this nervous edge, especially when the word lighthouse came up. Wicklow Bay’s lighthouse stood on the cliffs, tall and cracked, half swallowed by vines. At night, I’d watch from my bedroom window, and sometimes, only sometimes, a cold blue light would flicker from its windows, even though it had been shut down years ago.
A few weeks after we moved in, I met Finn Harrow. He was quiet, strange, and always seemed to appear out of the fog when I least expected it. He told me his brother vanished near the lighthouse last year. “Something lives in the sea,” he said the first time we talked. “It watches from below. And it sings.” I wanted to laugh, but something in his eyes stopped me.
I started hearing it too. It began one night when I couldn’t sleep. The wind had died down, and the whole house felt underwater, muffled, still. Then came the sound, faint but rising, a low hum, then a harmony of voices, deep and ancient, calling from the cliffs. I covered my ears, but it slipped through anyway, vibrating in my bones.
The next morning, I found an old leatherbound journal hidden in my mom’s old boxes in the attic. Her handwriting filled every page, shaky but fast, like she`d been racing to write everything down before something stopped her. The entries talked about a group called the Drowned Choir — sailors and villagers who`d once worshipped an ancient thing that lived beneath the cliffs. An “entity of the deep,” she called it. She said they built the lighthouse not to guide ships, but to contain it. That was when everything started to unravel.
Boats began vanishing from the harbor. People whispered about “ghost lights” out at sea, and sometimes fishermen would come back pale and silent, refusing to say what they`d seen. One morning, a man washed ashore. His skin was ice cold and slick, his eyes wide open. When Sheriff Lang dragged the body away, l saw a strange mark on the man`s neck, shaped like a hook. The sheriff had one too.
I told Finn about my mom`s journal, and we decided to see the lighthouse ourselves. The climb up the cliffs was brutal, wind slicing through us, fog thick enough to choke on. The lighthouse loomed ahead, its metal door rusted shut. But when Finn touched it, it swung open like it had been waiting.
Inside, the air was heavy and wet. Every step echoed. Jars lined the shelves, hundreds of them, filled with seawater that whispered if you listened long enough. Mr. Aldridge, the old lighthouse keeper, appeared from the shadows. His eyes were like staring into a fathomless void, and he spoke in riddles.
“The light must never go out,” he said, gripping my arm. “Or they`ll come for us again.”
Before we could ask anything, the floor beneath us groaned. Water leaked from the walls, black and oily. Finn and I ran down a spiral staircase into the core chamber, and that’s when we saw it.
The room was flooded, the water alive and breathing. It pulsed with light, faint blue like the glow of the deep. In the center, something moved, a shape too large to understand. It whispered in my mother’s voice, “Elena, join us.”
Finn shouted, but I couldn’t move. The voice pulled at me, wrapping around my thoughts like seaweed. It promised warmth, understanding , reunion. I saw flashes of my mom, her smiling face, her hand reaching through the water, and for a second, I almost reached back.
But then I remembered the journal. The last words she wrote before the ink smeared into nothing, “If the light dies, the sea will sing again.”
Finn grabbed my hand, dragging me to the control panel near the far wall. The old mechanisms were rusted, carved with symbols I didn’t understand. “We have to reignite it!” he yelled. The entity roared, a sound like a thousand voices screaming underwater. The whole tower shuddered.
I felt something cold grab my ankle and yank. The water surged upward, flooding the stairs. Finn tried to pull me free, but the thing below was stronger. It whispered secrets about my mother, how she hadn`t drowned by accident, how she`d offered herself to seal it away last time. My lungs burned as I kicked and clawed, my fingers finding the lever my mom had described in her notes.
With everything I had left, I pulled it.
The light exploded to life, a blinding, searing beam that cut through fog and the waves. The entity screamed. The water boiled. I remember being thrown back, the world going white.
When I woke, Finn was beside me, bruised and coughing. The water was gone. The lighthouse stood silent again, the light still burning weakly through the fog. Sheriff Lang and a few townspeople found us the next morning. They said the sea had gone calm overnight, and no one else had vanished since.
That was two weeks ago. The fog still hadn`t lifted.
Sometimes, late at night, I stand by the window and watch the cliffs. The lighthouse beam flickers now and then, like it’s struggling to stay alive. And when the wind shifts just right, I swear I can hear it again, a faint hum beneath the waves, a choir of voices singing low and distant
I try not to listen. But the truth is, I don’t think it’s gone. Not really.
And sometimes, when I dream, my mother is there again, standing in the shallows, smiling sadly. This time, she doesn’t sing. She just whispers one thing before she fades into the dark.
“The light won’t hold forever.”
