The research vessel was first sighted at 07:42, fourteen nautical miles off the coast, drifting on a glass-still sea.
No distress call.
No AIS signal.
No response to repeated hails.
By the time I boarded at 09:13, the sky had turned uniformly gray, the kind of low cloud that flattens the horizon and leaves the water colorless. From the tender, the ship’s hull rose out of the flat surface without reflection, matte and dark and slightly listing to port.
The name on the stern had been scrubbed away at some point. Only the ghosted outline of letters remained: R/V [ ]. The paint beneath was newer than the rest of the hull.
I logged my first impression in the recorder as I stepped onto the accommodation ladder.
“Boarding at 09:13. Vessel appears powered but unmanned. Running lights are off. No visible damage topside.”
The deck under my boots vibrated faintly, as if something deep below was turning over in its sleep.
The first anomaly was procedural, not paranormal.
Every door I tested was locked from the inside.
The forward lab.
The port-side cabins.
The galley.
The infirmary.
The engine room hatch.
Each handle gave under my hand just enough to rattle. Each one stopped against a lock that must be set from within.
Not jammed. Not corroded.
Locked.
On several, I could feel the internal mechanism shift when I tried them, as though weight pressed against the other side of the door.
I walked the main corridor twice, listening. The ventilation fans whispered. Somewhere metal ticked as it cooled. The ship’s own motion was almost absent. There was no swell, no wind, only the low roll of displaced water as the hull rocked half a degree at a time.
Halfway down the starboard passage I paused.
Someone coughed behind a closed cabin door.
It was not the building groan of metal. It was not ventilation noise. It was a dry, human cough, two short exhalations, then stillness.
I waited forty seconds, recorder running.
Nothing.
When I tried the handle, the lock held firm.
The bridge was open.
The door had been propped with a plastic crate wedged just so, as if someone had meant to return in a moment and never did.
Inside, the instruments hummed. The radar screen was on standby. The GPS display showed a string of zeros where the position should have been. The analog compass over the forward windows floated steady at 000°, pointed inland.
A half-empty mug of coffee sat in a ring on the console, contents cold and forming a faint skin. A pencil lay broken in front of it, snapped cleanly in two.
Logbook on the chart table. I flipped to the last leg of the voyage.
ENTRY 47: Doors on C-deck locking themselves again. Thought it was pressure differences from that front, but pressure’s stable. Had to kick the laundry door open from outside. No one inside.
ENTRY 48: Tapping sounds from under the floor of the aft lab. Checked bilge. Dry. No loose gear. Harlan says he heard someone walking behind him in the lower corridor. Cameras show nothing.
ENTRY 49: Woke up to three doors in the passage standing open. All have inside locks engaged. We don’t prop them that way.
ENTRY 50: Voices in the hold. Roll call accounted for all hands. No stowaways. Don’t like it down there alone. Feels like someone’s waiting.
The final entry had no number.
The writing was heavier, the pen pressing hard enough to leave grooves in the paper.
We are not alone on this vessel.
No signature. No time.
I checked the ship’s clocks. 09:37.
South of the bridge, a narrow stairwell led down to B-deck. The light over the landing flickered intermittently, buzzing in a frequency that sat behind the ears rather than in them.
The first three doors I checked were locked.
The fourth was not.
It stood slightly ajar, just enough for the latch tongue to rest on the strike without engaging. The brass handle was worn where fingers had turned it thousands of times. The plaque beside it read 3B.
Inside, the cabin was almost painfully ordinary. Narrow bunk. Built-in desk bolted to the bulkhead. A round porthole streaked with dried salt. The air smelled of detergent and stale air-conditioning.
On the desk sat a glass of water, beads of condensation still forming on its surface. Next to it, a single sheet of lined paper weighed flat by a ballpoint pen.
Four words, printed in careful block letters:
DO NOT OPEN ANOTHER ONE.
The pen lay uncapped, its tip drying in the cabin’s still air.
I put the recorder on the desk.
“Cabin 3B appears recently occupied. Condensation on glass suggests very recent activity. Note left on desk: ‘Do not open another one.’ No indication to whom the note was addressed.”
As I spoke, the faint hum of the ship’s systems rose half a tone, like someone softly tightening a string.
Out in the passage, something moved. Not footsteps. More like weight redistributing itself through metal. A long, slow deformation.
The door eased itself closed by two centimeters without anyone touching it.
I stepped into the passage and found it exactly as I’d left it.
The soundscape of the vessel changed over the next hour.
At first there were only isolated noises: a chair scraping somewhere above, a soft thud in a distant compartment, a muffled shift of cargo in the hold.
Then patterns emerged.
Three knocks underfoot. Pause. Two lighter taps in the bulkhead at my left shoulder.
A sequence repeated near the infirmary, then again near the laundry, then again near the aft lab. Each time the spacing was the same, as if the sound itself were being moved room to room without variation.
I followed it.
Each time I reached the spot where it had last sounded, it relocated one compartment farther aft, like I was chasing something through walls that did not want to be caught.
At the engine room hatch, the knocking stopped.
The hatch wheel was dogged shut. The inspection window was painted over from inside. When I pressed my ear to the metal, I heard a low, steady vibration, too smooth to be a running engine and too constant to be passive hull noise.
Something on the other side of the door was maintaining tension against the metal, like a person bracing themselves with both hands.
The lock on that hatch was also set from within.
At 10:22 the ship changed its mind about being silent.
I was back on the bridge, watching the radar. For most of the morning it had shown only our own echo: a pale shape at the center of the green phosphor, the familiar outline of the hull, nothing else within range.
At 10:22:03, a second echo appeared.
Same position.
Same outline.
Offset from the first by less than the width of the trace, as though there were two identical vessels occupying the same coordinates, jittering in and out of phase with each other.
The screen did not refresh normally. The sweep line passed, and both echoes remained, one slightly brighter, pulsing faintly in time with the low vibration I’d felt through the deck.
I adjusted gain. The secondary echo grew more defined. The caption at the bottom of the screen, where the system labeled contacts for logging, flickered.
For a single frame, it read:
RV [ ] (PRESENT)
RV [ ] (OTHER)
The word “OTHER” remained burned into my vision longer than the phosphor justified.
I blinked and the label was gone.
I didn’t decide to leave the ship so much as choose not to go any deeper into it. The lower holds, the sealed engine room, the locked infirmary—whatever sequence of doors the note in 3B was warning against, I had already opened one more than intended.
Before disembarking, I returned to that cabin.
The door to 3B was now fully closed. The latch seated. The lock engaged.
From inside, the soft scrape of a chair being moved across the floor, then the delicate click of a pen against wood.
“Cabin 3B,” I said into the recorder, “appears to have… changed status. Audible movement inside. No visible occupant.”
I tried the handle.
It resisted.
For the first time that day, I knocked.
No answer.
Just the faintest impression, through the metal, of someone—or something—standing very close to the other side.
I left the recorder running on the deck outside, its red LED blinking.
When I came back for it three minutes later, the hallway was empty.
The door was still locked.
The recorder had captured thirty-seven seconds of corridor noise, then a soft rustle, then the sound of paper sliding across a desk. A pen scratching.
No footsteps. No voices. No door opening.
Just writing.
It wasn’t until I was back on the tender, the vessel receding against the flat gray sky, that I realized I still had the ship’s log in my bag.
I opened it on my lap.
There, beneath the last entry I’d read on the bridge, another line had been added in a different hand than the previous ones. The ink was still drying, smudged slightly where the page had brushed against something.
The date line was blank.
The text was not.
He is on board now. He is reading this.
No name.
No signature.
No indication of who had written it or when.
The next page was empty.
I checked the recorder’s timestamp against the moment I had last held the log on the bridge. The new entry did not exist then.
The log had been updated after I boarded.
Somewhere between the locked doors, the hollow corridors, and the empty cabin with its single warning, the vessel had found room for me in its record.
[End of recovered material]