Deep Water
Horror on and under the water: ships, islands, tides, rivers, drowned towns and the long dark below the surface. Sailors have always told the strangest stories, and these are some of them.
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The Tide Tables
My grandfather left me his cottage, his boat, and forty years of tide tables written in his own hand. They are accurate to the minute. They also have a third column.
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Walking Night
On the island where I married, there is one night at the end of October when every house sets its shoes out on the step, a pair for everyone inside and one pair more. In the morning the extra pair is gone, and that is a good year.
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“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” Classic
A sceptical young professor on a seaside golfing holiday finds an old bronze whistle in the ruins of a Templar church and decides to blow it.
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The Call of Cthulhu Classic
Sorting his late great-uncle's papers, a man finds a clay sculpture of a winged, tentacled being, and notes about artists who all dreamed of it on the same nights.
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The Willows Classic
Two friends canoeing down the Danube make camp on a tiny island of willows in a vast, flooded marsh, and the willows seem to move.
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A Warning to the Curious Classic
A young man on the Suffolk coast has dug up something that local legend says must stay buried, and he is no longer walking alone.
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The Upper Berth Classic
A seasoned traveller tells how he was assigned stateroom 105 on a transatlantic liner, a cabin whose previous passengers all went overboard.
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A Haunted Island Classic
Left alone for the end of the summer in a cottage on a remote Canadian island, a student starts to feel he is not the last guest after all.
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The Striding Place Classic
A guest at a Yorkshire shooting party goes searching the moors for his missing friend near a narrow and treacherous stretch of river.
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Dagon Classic
A morphine-addicted sailor writes his last statement, describing what he found when the sea floor rose to the surface.
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Soundings
Extracts from the survey log of a small research vessel mapping the floor of a remote northern sound. The seabed there is supposed to be flat, and sixty meters down.
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Same Name, Same Number
Nine days out of Honolulu on a solo delivery, my chartplotter showed another boat two miles ahead of me on the AIS. It had my boat's name and my boat's identification number, and it was sitting exactly where I would be in six hours.
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MS. Found in a Bottle Classic
A storm leaves one survivor adrift on a doomed ship, and then something far stranger comes out of the dark water to meet him.
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Three at Table Classic
Over drinks at an inn, a seaman tells of the one uncanny night of his life, at a lonely house in the marshes.
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Pot Forty-One
On my first season crabbing the Bering Sea, one of our pots came up with a man's wedding ring tangled in the mesh. The man it belonged to was standing next to me on deck, wearing it.
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A Descent into the Maelström Classic
A white-haired fisherman leads a visitor to a Norwegian cliff and tells how a single day in a whirlpool aged him decades.