The Fetid Voyage of the Damned
The mariner stands, eyes shot through with red. Veins writhing under his parchment-thin skin, a vessel of rot and sin. He is a thing spat out by the sea, a wretched, walking omen, the stench of salt and decay thick as tar upon him. The people gather, drawn by the undertow of his voice, a whisper of doom wrapped in bile, and they listen, helpless, their fates now tangled in the wreckage of his confession.
“It was the bird,” he croaks, voice raw, each word a jagged splinter clawing up his throat. “The albatross. The cursed thing. We fed it to the abyss, tore its throat out with our own hands, its blood slick upon the deck, its cries ringing into the heavens, and the sea, oh, the sea, she woke up. She saw. And she was hungry.”
The ship had been a coffin on blackened water, its ribs splintering under the weight of a sky strangled in storm-clouds. The men laughed as the bird died, their teeth bared, their hands eager, as if they had gutted God himself. But the water turned to glass, smooth, unmoving, reflecting back only their grinning skulls. Then the whispers began. Voices, voices, voices, rising from the deep, a chorus of the drowned, their mouths still filled with salt and agony.
The mariner shakes, his hands clawing at his own flesh as if he could rip free of the memory. The townspeople lean in, their breath stilled, their spines rigid with dread.
“We thought the storm was the punishment,” he spits, lips foaming with the telling. “But no, no, that was mercy. The true curse came in the silence, in the stillness that stretched on, hour after hour, day after day, with no wind, no tide, just a sun like a nailed eye in the sky, watching, waiting. We ran out of water. We ran out of hope. And then we ran out of men.”
The ship became a thing of hushed breath and gnawed bones. The first man to die had the fortune of thirst. The second was not so lucky. When hunger clawed up their throats, when madness licked the backs of their skulls, they turned on him like wolves, like starving rats in a pit of filth. His screams were brief, choked off with blood and teeth and tearing fingers. And the mariner had eaten, oh yes, he had partaken, chewing gristle between his molars, tasting sin on his tongue.
But the sea would not let them die so easily. The dead men rose, their eyes burnt-out pits, their fingers bloated and black, their mouths moving without sound. They did not breathe, but they watched. They followed. They cursed with their silence.
The ship sank in pieces, boards splitting like ribs, mast snapping like a spine. The ocean swallowed the mariner whole, dragged him down into its belly, held him tight in a cold embrace. And then, Neptune. King of the Deep, God of the Endless Murk, a thing of coral-crowned horror and infinite, unfeeling love.
He kissed the mariner with lips of water, and filled his lungs with liquid, but did not let him drown. He whispered with a voice older than time, a gurgling, abyssal decree that bound the mariner to the waking world.
“You will tell them,” the voice had said, thick as oil, deep as tombs. “You will tell them, so that they might fear. So that they might remember. And they will never be free.”
And so the mariner woke upon the shore, hacking up seawater and crying out for death that would never come. The curse had become him, was stitched into his very being, and his eyes, oh, his eyes, still saw the dead men staring, their faces leering from every dark corner, their mouths shaping words never spoken.
The people who listen now are doomed. Their faces are pale, their hands twitch, their blood runs cold in their veins. They hear, and they understand, and now the curse slithers into them like worms into fresh corpses.
The mariner laughs, high and broken, mouth stretching too wide, lips peeling back from blackened teeth. His laughter is a riptide, pulling them under. They will never unhear his tale. They will never be clean again. Their dreams will become his, their nights filled with the endless, gaping maw of the sea, and the dead men, always watching, watching, watching.
The waves come. The tide rises. The mariner walks away, leaving them behind to suffer, just as he had.
“The curse is never-ending, and it wears his face.“