Deep Thing ©2026 J.S. Wells Click For PDF

I have often wondered, in the days since that night, whether some part of me knew what was coming. Whether the pull I felt toward that iron tower in the bay was not nostalgia, but something older, something that had been waiting beneath the black water for precisely this conjunction of despair and solitude.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The story begins, as these things often do, with a boat.

 

Nick’s center console boat cut through Mount Hope Bay like a butter knife through cold margarine, slow, deliberate, slightly apologetic. The May sky hung low and grey, pregnant with the storm that had been threatening since morning after an overcast week. I sat on the bench seat, duffel bag between my knees, watching Borden Flats Lighthouse grow from a rusty smudge on the horizon into something solid. Something real.

Something final.

“Fourth year running, right?” Nick called over the engine’s whine. He was grinning, the kind of smile that came easy to men who loved their work. Salt-and-pepper beard, flannel shirt, hands like catcher’s mitts. “Been with us from the start. You and your girl gonna try for five next year?”

“Just me this time,” I said. The words came out easier than I expected. I’d been practicing. “Thought I’d give it a solo run.”

“Ah.” Nick’s smile didn’t falter, but something shifted in his eyes, that particular New England discretion that knows when not to pry. “Well, you picked a hell of a night for it. Storm’s been building all day.”

“Good,” I said. And I meant it.

He cut the engine as we approached, letting momentum carry us to the lighthouse’s iron ladder. The structure rose from the water like a middle finger of iron and concrete, its massive base squatting in the bay as though it had grown there over centuries rather than been built. Rust bled down its sides in long vertical streaks, patterns that looked almost organic. Almost intentional.

“You’ve done the tour before,” Nick said as he tied off, “but I can run through it again if you want. Some folks like the ritual of it.”

I looked up at the lighthouse. At the dark windows. At the gallery rail circling the top like a crown of thorns.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’d like to hear it again.”

Nick’s face lit up the way it probably did every time. This was a man who’d poured his life into preserving this place, and it showed in every gesture as we climbed the ladder to the platform.

“Built in 1881,” he began, producing a key ring that looked like it had been inherited from a medieval jailer. “Cast iron tower, Victorian design, one of only two offshore lighthouse towers in the world you can actually sleep in.” He unlocked the door with a theatrical flourish. “Welcome to the Borden Flats Lighthouse, Justin. Your castle for the evening.”

The interior smelled like old metal and older wood, with an undertone of mildew that no amount of dehumidifiers could quite erase. It was a scent I’d come to associate with Amelia, with her laugh echoing off these walls, with her hand in mine as we climbed the spiral stairs, with the way she’d looked in the light from the windows as the sun set over Fall River.

“Ground floor’s your kitchen,” Nick continued, gesturing to the space. “Got your stove, your fridge, everything runs on solar, so we’re a bit at the mercy of the weather. Been overcast for a week or so now, so the batteries are maybe sixty percent charged. I’d go easy on the power if you can.”

“No problem,” I said. I wouldn’t be needing it for long.

He showed me the head, the sitting area on the second floor, the sleeping quarters on the third level, the storage closets that still held rusted artifacts from the lighthouse’s working days. His enthusiasm was infectious in a way that made my chest hurt. Here was a man who’d found meaning in preservation, in service, in the simple act of keeping something beautiful alive.

I wondered what that felt like.

“Now,” Nick said as we returned to the main level, “house rules. One: don’t go out on the gallery if the wind picks up, those railings are original and they’re rated for seagulls, not people. Two: if you hear anything weird, it’s just the tide. Metal expands and contracts, makes all kinds of noises. Three: the record player’s original, so if you use it, be gentle. And four,” He paused, glancing out the window at the darkening sky. “If that storm gets nasty and something goes wrong, I won’t be able to come get you. Coast Guard might, if it’s an emergency, but they won’t risk it unless it’s life or death.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said. And I meant that too, in a way he couldn’t understand.

“Right.” Nick clapped me on the shoulder. “You’ve got my number. You’ve been here before. You know the drill.” He moved toward the door, then paused. “Hey, Justin?”

“Yeah?”

“You mentioned wanting to experience a storm out here. Looks like tonight’s your night. Should be pretty spectacular.” His grin was genuine, almost boyish. “Enjoy it, yeah?”

“I will,” I said.

And then he was gone, the sound of his outboard fading into the wind until I was alone with the rising sea and my decided fate.

 

I’ve always been methodical. It’s what made me good at my job, back when “good at my job” meant something more than “hasn’t been fired yet.” Twenty-three years in manufacturing, watching machines do the same tasks over and over, fixing them when they broke, maintaining them when they didn’t. There was a comfort in routine. In predictability.

In knowing exactly how something would end.

I unpacked with the same precision I’d applied to everything else in my life. Clothes all over the bed upstairs, toiletries scattered on the bathroom sink downstairs. The bottle of Macallan 18, Sherry Oak Cask, the good stuff, placed carefully on the desk on the second floor next to two glasses.

Two glasses.

I stared at them for a moment, those twin tumblers catching the grey light from the window. Habit. Muscle memory. The ghost of optimism.

I left them both there.

My laptop came next, the case worn at the corners from years of commutes and coffee shops. I sat down at the second-floor desk and opened it, waiting for it to boot. The wallpaper flickered to life: Amelia, photographed from behind as she stood on the gallery of this very lighthouse two years ago, her hair whipping in the wind, one hand raised to shield her eyes as she looked toward the horizon. I’d taken the shot without her knowing, captured that moment of her searching for something I could never quite see.

I closed the laptop.

The duffel bag was nearly empty now. Just one item left, wrapped in a towel at the bottom. I lifted it out, set it on the desk, unfolded the cloth with the same care I might use to unveil something sacred.

The Colt Gold Cup .45 gleamed dully in the failing light. The monogrammed grips, JSW, Justin Samuel Willis, a detail I’d insisted on when I bought it ten years ago, caught my thumb as I lifted it. The weight was familiar. Comforting.

I’d been shooting since I was young. My father’s hobby, passed down like a genetic trait. Amelia had never minded. She’d come to the range with me a few times, found it meditative in her own way. “It’s very Zen,” she’d said once, loading a magazine with focused precision. “All that concentration on a single point.”

I set the pistol down.

Then I pulled the single round from my pocket, a Hornady XTP hollow point, 185 grain, and placed it beside the gun. Not in it. Just next to it.

Not yet.

 

The wind was picking up. I could hear it testing the seams of the lighthouse, probing for weaknesses the way water finds cracks in stone. Thunder rumbled somewhere to the south, still distant but coming closer with the patience of something that had all the time in the world.

I sighed while opening the laptop back up and tethered the laptop to my phone. One bar of signal. Maybe.

To: Family & Friends

Subject:

The cursor blinked at me. Patient. Waiting.

I’ve started this email six times now. There’s no good way to say it.

Delete.

To: Everyone

Subject: Distribution of Stuff

Marissa gets the vinyl collection, she’s the only one who’d be able to read all of the underground black metal band logos anyway. Tom can have the b-movie DVDs. Someone needs to destroy my hard drives. All of them. Especially the –

Delete.

To: Amelia

Subject: I understand now

My fingers hovered over the keys.

You left on a Monday. Not even a significant Monday, just another day in a sequence of days that had stopped meaning anything. I found the email when I got home from work. You’d sent it while I was in the third hour of a production meeting about process optimization.

“I’m changing, Justin. It won’t work anymore.”

Like we were a subscription you’d decided to cancel. Like fifteen years could be summarized in two sentences and a Gmail notification.

I looked for you. You know I did. Your phone went straight to voicemail. Your cousin said she hadn’t heard from you. Your work said you’d resigned, effective immediately. You just… vanished. Like you’d never been real at all.

And maybe that’s the truth of it. Maybe I invented you. Maybe I invented us. Maybe –

Something scraped against the window.

I stopped typing.

It came again, a long, slow drag across the glass, deliberate and rhythmic. The sound was achingly familiar in the way that certain sounds are hardwired into childhood, the particular tick and scrape of a branch against a bedroom window on a stormy night. That’s exactly what it sounded like. A branch, flexing in the wind, tapping for attention the way a bored child taps a shoulder. Petulant. Persistent.

I almost smiled at it. Almost let myself be comforted by it.

Then I put my glass down.

I was sitting in the middle of Mount Hope Bay. The nearest tree was somewhere on the Fall River shoreline, a quarter mile of open water away. There were no branches. There was nothing out there but iron and water and empty air between the windows and the surface of the bay.

Something had scraped against the glass.

I sat very still and listened to the storm and tried to remember how to breathe.

 

The scraping stopped.

I told myself it was the iron contracting in the cold. I told myself Nick had mentioned the lighthouse made noises. I told myself I was a grown man who had come here with a specific purpose and was not about to be derailed by the sounds of an old building in a storm.

I turned back to the laptop.

I’m at the lighthouse. Our lighthouse. I thought it was fitting, coming here for the last time. For my last birthday. I thought maybe I’d feel close to you again, or at least close to the memory of you.

Lightning strobed through the windows.

In that half-second of white light, something moved past the window.

Not debris. Not shadow. Something upright. Something that moved with the suggestion of limbs.

I was on my feet before I’d decided to stand, the chair scraping back across the floor. I stared at the window. Outside, the storm churned and the darkness pressed against the glass like it was trying to get in.

Of course nothing there. No people, certainly no trees.

I was on the second floor of a lighthouse tower. Nothing was walking past that window.

I stood there for a long moment, heart doing things hearts aren’t supposed to do, then sat back down with what I felt was admirable composure for a man who’d just frightened himself half to death in a haunted lighthouse. Which was not haunted. Which was just old iron and solar panels and the accumulated atmosphere of a hundred and forty years of isolation.

Right.

I poured three fingers of the Macallan into one of the two glasses and drank half of it in a pull that Amelia would have called wasteful and I called therapeutic.

You’re not here, Amelia. You’re not anywhere.

So I’m not going to be anywhere either.

I hope you found whatever you were looking for when you –

The scraping came back.

Lower now. Not from the window beside me but from somewhere near the waterline, working its way up the concrete base and along the iron hull with a rhythmic, deliberate patience that had nothing to do with wind or current. Something with purchase. Something that was climbing.

I closed the laptop.

The single bar of signal had given up entirely. The email sat unsent in the dark of the draft folder, half-finished, which felt appropriate. Most things I’d started had ended that way.

The sound paused.

In the silence, I became aware of the smell.

It crept in around the door seals and the old window gaskets, subtle at first, just the bay, just the salt air I’d been breathing all evening. But this was different. Thicker. The salt was underlaid with something organic and ancient, a reek of deep water and rotting vegetation, of the places sunlight never reaches. It settled in the back of my throat like a memory I couldn’t place.

Kelp. Blood. The particular cold of water under pressure.

My eyes went to the gun on the desk.

The Macallan glass was still in my hand. I set it down very carefully, as if sudden movements might matter, and picked up the Colt Gold Cup. The monogrammed grips found my palm the way they always did, JSW pressed into my skin, familiar as a handshake.

The single Hornady XTP round sat beside the laptop.

I picked it up. Slid it into the chamber. Released the slide.

The mechanical sound was enormous in the silence.

I moved to the edge of the stairs and listened.

Something shuffled on the platform outside the front door below.

Not the wind. Not debris. Not old iron complaining about the cold. Something was moving out there with a wet, dragging gait, circling the entrance platform in a slow orbit that was pulling tighter with each pass. I could hear the slap of something damp against the decking. Could hear the irregular rhythm of movement that followed no pattern I recognized.

One bullet.

I had one bullet, and whatever was outside that door was doing a very convincing impression of something that might require significantly more.

The thought arrived with almost clinical detachment: one bullet, Justin. You brought exactly one bullet, you colossal idiot. In my defense, I had only anticipated needing it once, for one specific purpose, and this scenario had not featured in my planning.

The smell intensified as I made my way down the stairs to the ground floor. Salt and rot and copper and something else, something underneath it all that was almost, almost familiar in a way I couldn’t articulate. Like a song heard from another room, the melody just out of reach.

I raised the pistol and pointed it at the door.

My hands were trembling.

Twenty-three years running manufacturing equipment that was in a perpetual state of trying to kill me and they’d never shaken. Fifteen years with Amelia through arguments and reconciliations and the slow mundane terror of building a life, and they’d never shaken.

They shook now.

The shuffling stopped directly outside the door.

A silence that was not silence, full of weather and water and the ragged sound of my own breathing and, beneath all of it, a sound I couldn’t quite identify. A low, rhythmic clicking, like stones tumbling in surf, like the last sound a depth gauge makes before it stops working.

The smell rolled through the door seams in a wave.

My finger slipped past the trigger guard.

One bullet, I thought. Make it count.

Make it count for what?

I had no answer for that.

The storm hit the lighthouse like a fist.

And the door blew open.

Every ounce of my fear told me I should have fired. Should have squeezed the trigger and put my one irreplaceable round into whatever was standing in that doorway.

I didn’t.

Instead, I froze.

But not from fear.

The gun stayed up, pointed at the figure in the door, my finger resting back on the guard. Every rational circuit in my brain was screaming at me to shoot, to run, to do anything except stand there with my mouth open like a man watching a car accident in slow motion.

But my hands had stopped shaking.

 

At first, I thought it was the darkness taking shape. A trick of shadow and lightning, my mind already half-gone with grief and whiskey fumes. But then the lightning flashed again, and I saw her.

Pallid grey skin, slick as a dolphin’s, gleaming with seawater or something thicker. She stood in the doorway like a question mark, silhouetted against the storm, and the smell that rolled off her was overwhelming, that brine and copper and something ancient, something that had been at the bottom of the ocean since before men gave names to their fears. It was her scent.

She took a step forward.

The floorboards groaned.

My brain tried to catalogue what I was seeing: the ropes of kelp draped across her shoulders like a shawl, the way her otherwise naked skin seemed to pulse with its own light, the pitch-black eyes that caught no reflection, that seemed to absorb the very idea of light. Her mouth opened, too wide, too many teeth, serrated and gleaming, and a sound emerged that was not quite a voice.

Click-click-krrrt.

The clacking of stones. Like bones breaking underwater.

And yet.

And yet.

The way she tilted her head. The angle of her shoulders. The shape of her, underneath everything wrong and alien and impossible.

“Amelia?”

The word came out as a whisper. A prayer. An accusation.

She took another step toward me and, without deciding to, I set the gun down on the kitchen table. She moved with a fluid grace that was nothing like the way Amelia had moved, and yet everything like it. How do you explain recognition that bypasses reason? How do you describe knowing something in your marrow, in the stupid animal part of your brain that still believes in ghosts and true love and the possibility of miracles?

I knew it was her.

I knew it wasn’t her.

I knew I didn’t care which was true.

“Amelia,” I said again, and this time it wasn’t a question.

She crossed the remaining distance between us, and I met her halfway, arms opening in an embrace that every rational cell in my body screamed against. She was cold. So cold it hurt, like plunging your hands into snow. And wet, not just damp, but wet, like she’d brought the entire ocean with her, like the bay itself was wrapped around my chest, squeezing, drowning me in an embrace I’d spent a month craving.

The smell was overwhelming. Old death and new life, salt and copper, the particular rot that happens in deep water where the sun never reaches. My shirt soaked through instantly, clinging to my skin, and when I pulled back to look at her, my hands came away coated in something slick and clear. The cold coming off her was permeating, bone-deep, the kind that doesn’t leave. I shivered and stared into those black, lightless eyes and saw absolutely nothing looking back.

Click-krrrt-click.

Her head tilted, those black eyes fixing on mine with an intensity that was almost hunger. Almost recognition. Almost love?

I cupped her face, her cold, smooth, wrong face, and felt ridges beneath the skin that shouldn’t be there. Felt the way her jaw moved in ways that jaws shouldn’t move. Saw the teeth, row upon row of them, gleaming in the storm-light.

And I smiled.

“I guess you really did change,” I said.

Outside, the storm screamed its approval.

Inside, something that might have been Amelia clicked again, a sound that might have been laughter, or hunger, or the ocean itself learning to speak.

And I stood there, dripping and cold and more alive than I’d felt in thirty-seven days, holding onto a monster that wore the shape of the only thing I’d ever loved.

The gun sat on the kitchen table, loaded with the bullet I wouldn’t need.

Not anymore.

 

I should have pulled away. Should have recognized the danger in those too-many teeth, in those eyes like oil slicks, in the wrongness coming off her in waves, the particular presence of something that had crossed a threshold the living weren’t meant to cross, announcing itself to every nerve in my body before my mind understood what my eyes were looking at.

Instead, I leaned in.

My lips met hers, cold, slick with brine, tasting of kelp and copper and something older than salt. For a heartbeat, she was still. Then her hand shot to the back of my head, fingers tangling in my hair with a grip that was almost violent, and her mouth opened against mine.

Pain lanced through my lower lip.

Those teeth, serrated, sharp as broken glass, caught flesh, and I tasted blood mixing with seawater. She pulled back just enough for me to see her tongue, too long, too dark, slide across her lips, collecting the red that dripped there. Her eyes fixed on mine.

Then she lunged.

The force of it drove me backward, my spine hitting the kitchen table before we tumbled to the floor. The gun clattered somewhere behind me. She was on top of me, claws I hadn’t noticed before shredding through my shirt like wrapping paper. I felt the sting of cuts opening across my chest, my shoulders, but the pain was distant, muffled beneath the weight of something else.

Terror. Lust. The two twisted together until I couldn’t tell which was which.

My hands found her skin, that wrong, slick skin, and slid across ridges and valleys that made no anatomical sense. She was cold everywhere, glacier-cold, but somehow burning. Her mouth moved down my neck, and I felt those teeth drag across my throat, not quite breaking skin but promising they could. Promising they would.

Her lips, those strange, oversized lips, moved lower, and I stopped thinking in words.

The teeth scraped. Didn’t go deep.

Just deep enough.

 

Somewhere in the haze of it, the world began to shift.

The lighthouse dissolved around us like watercolors in rain. The floor became sand, then nothing at all. We were falling, no, sinking, down through layers of black water that pressed against my chest until my lungs screamed.

I couldn’t breathe.

Didn’t need to breathe.

Her arms and legs wrapped around me, constrictor-tight, pulling me deeper into the crushing dark. I could see things moving in the periphery of my vision, shapes too large to comprehend, geometries that hurt to perceive. Ancient things. Sleeping things. Things that had been waiting in the deep places since before the continents learned their names.

Her eyes stared into mine, pitch-black and infinite, and I understood that I was drowning.

Not in water.

In her. In whatever she had become.

The pressure was immense. My ribs creaked. My skull felt like it might collapse inward, compressed to the density of diamond. But her grip held me together even as it pulled me apart. We spiraled down through the abyss, two bodies becoming one, flesh and not-flesh, human and not-human.

I saw lights in the darkness. Bioluminescent stars spelling out names I couldn’t pronounce in languages that predated tongues. I saw cities of coral and bone, spires reaching up from trenches so deep they might as well be wounds in the world. I saw her, really her, Amelia standing on a beach I didn’t recognize, walking into surf that glowed with phosphorescence, walking until the water closed over her head and she didn’t come back up.

I’m changing, Justin.

The water filled my lungs.

I let it.

We spun in the current, wrapped around each other like DNA spiraling into new configurations. Her teeth found my shoulder, my neck, my chest. Each bite was a baptism. Each scratch a scripture written in blood and seawater.

I was dying.

I was being born.

I was…

 

Sunlight.

I woke to sunlight.

The bed beneath me was soaked, reeking of brine and aquatic rot. Strands of kelp lay across my chest like the aftermath of a shipwreck. My body ached in ways I didn’t know bodies could ache, deep, bone-level pain mixed with a strange, electric soreness that made me think of live wires and third-degree burns.

I sat up slowly, the room spinning.

The lighthouse. I was in the third-floor sleeping quarters. Morning light streamed through the windows, almost obscenely bright after the storm. I looked down at myself.

Scratches. Dozens of them, crisscrossing my torso like some kind of ritual scarification. Some were shallow, already scabbing over. Others were deeper, still weeping. My lip was swollen where her teeth had caught it, crusted with dried blood.

It hadn’t been a dream.

I stood on shaking legs and moved to the window.

My mind raced, thoughts tumbling over each other in a cascade of panic and hope and something darker I didn’t want to name.

She came back.

She’s not Amelia anymore.

She came back for you.

She could have killed you.

She came back.

I looked at the scratches again. Traced one with a fingertip, a long shallow furrow running from my collarbone to my ribs, and hissed at the sting of it. There were deeper ones. Places where the cuts had wept through the night and dried into dark crusts that pulled and cracked when I moved. My lip throbbed where her teeth had found it. My throat ached in ways I didn’t want to think about too carefully.

She had done this to me.

I should have been furious. Should have been terrified. Every reasonable instinct I possessed was lining up in an orderly queue to inform me that what had happened last night was not survivable a second time, that whatever she was now she was not safe, that the scratches on my chest were a warning written in a language even an idiot could read.

And beneath all of that, underneath the fear and the pain and the raw animal knowledge that I had been in the presence of something that could have unmade me without a second thought, was something else entirely. Something that made the fear worse by existing alongside it.

I wanted her to touch me again.

Not despite the scratches. Not in spite of the teeth and the cold and the wrongness radiating off her like cold from a stone that has never seen sunlight. I wanted it because of those things, which was a thought so profoundly disturbing that I filed it alongside all the other thoughts I wasn’t examining this morning.

I looked at the blood. At the evidence of what had happened, what I’d let happen, what some traitorous part of me was already cataloguing as the most alive I had felt in years, possibly ever, and felt something crack in my chest.

Everything had changed.

And I wasn’t sure anymore whether that terrified me or not, but I knew I had to face it.

I made my way down to the ground floor, still naked, wearing only my wounds. The gun was on the floor where it had fallen, half-buried under a rope of kelp that had no business being on the ground floor of a lighthouse. I picked it up.

My hands worked on autopilot, muscle memory from a thousand range sessions. The weight of it steadied me, I pulled the slide back to inspect it, then let it snap back into place. The round was still in the chamber where I’d left it.

One promise.

But maybe there were others..

I walked through the kitchen, past the two glasses I’d set out, past the laptop still open to the email I’d never sent. I pushed open the door to the platform.

The wind had died. The bay was calm, almost glassy, reflecting the pink and gold of dawn. She didn’t turn as I approached, didn’t acknowledge my presence at all. Just sat there, grey and still and utterly alien in the morning light.

I walked up behind her.

The gun hung at my side, heavy as judgment.

My finger rested on the trigger guard, not quite touching the trigger. Not yet.

What was I going to do?

Shoot her? End whatever nightmare this had become? Put a bullet in the thing that wore Amelia’s gestures like a stolen coat?

Shoot myself? Finish what I’d come here to do? One round, one ending, clean and final?

I stood there, paralyzed by the weight of the decision, and checked the chamber yet again, and old, nervous habit. The brass cartridge gleamed in the early light. Still there. Still ready.

Still mine.

She turned her head.

The movement was too fast, too fluid, inhuman in its grace. Those pitch-black eyes fixed on me, on the gun, on the question I was asking with my presence.

Then her lips pulled back.

Teeth. Rows of them, gleaming and sharp.

Was that a smile?

A threat?

An invitation?

She stood in one smooth motion, kelp sliding across her skin like living things, and faced me fully. We stood there, naked with kelp, separated by three feet and an entire ocean of impossible choices.

Then she leaned in and licked my swollen lip.

The pain was exquisite.

Before I could move, before I could think, she turned and dove off the platform.

The splash was barely audible.

I rushed to the rail and watched her grey form knife through the water with the ease of something born to it. She surfaced twenty feet out, her head breaking the water like a seal’s.

Click-click-krrrt.

The sound carried across the calm water, almost playful.

Then she dove again, her body arcing in a perfect curve before disappearing beneath the surface.

I stood there, searching the water, the gun hanging loose at my side. Seconds stretched. My heart hammered against my ribs, those ribs that still ached with the memory of crushing pressure and impossible depths, and bioluminescent cities I long to see again while wrapped in her body.

She surfaced again, farther out now, and that same clicking carried across the water, closer now, almost like a word.

A call.

A summons.

Then she was gone, swallowed by the bay like she’d never been there at all.

I looked at the gun for a long time. The bay was quiet. The water below was black and deep and patient.

The cartridge caught the morning light as it arced over the rail, turning once, twice, before it hit the surface and was gone. I watched the ripples spread until there was nothing left to watch.

The Colt was empty now.

I’m not entirely sure how that happened.

I let it drop onto the deck chair where she’d been sitting and leaned over the rail.

The water below was black and deep and waiting.

I had known what I needed to do.