This version of Free Story Sundays is one of my favourites. The Slither and the Crush was first published in Eidolotry #3: Horror From The Great White North. It’s out of print now, but in honour of Halloween this past Thursday I will drag it screaming out of the grave for you to read.

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Photo by Stormseeker on Unsplash

At night the kids inevitably gather at the base of the pier, like kids in any seaside town Phillipe has ever lived in. They bring along six-packs of beer and other fun substances and build fires in the stretch of worn beach that rubs up against the pitted cement of the pier. They know Phillipe is there but they don’t mind; Phillipe has his own wild, restless mystique, an odd emanation of respect that stems directly from a certain refusal of categorization. He is neither old (and therefore pathetic) or crazy (and therefore dangerous). He is not homeless, per se; rather he likes to think of himself as having a very broad definition of home. He lives in strange places, at ragged intervals, before moving on.  

The kids, regardless of the town, always seem to accept him as part of the landscape – not necessarily one of their own, but an alright dude in a sense. He chalks this up to two rules: always share what you have and never hit on the locals. The former ensures that they’ll tolerate him at minimum; the latter, he’s found, prevents him from ending up in a bloody heap at the edge of a park or beside some lonesome two-lane highway. He’s seen it happen to other drifters in towns up and down the American east coast and he’s aware enough to know when to back off and when to leave town entirely.  

The kids in Ocean City, Maryland are not much different than many others that Phillipe has run across; if anything, they’re a friendlier bunch. They’ve taken him on as a mascot of sorts, sharing inside jokes and pressing him to join them with a hilarity brought about through the intersection of freedom and youth. He does join them, careful not to appear threatening; adolescence is its own ocean and its storms can blow up as suddenly and be just as lethal.  

They’re a good bunch, though, and Phillipe feels for them. They’re in a fight with time and so is Phillipe and the common cause makes them shipmates, at least for Phillipe. There is a great deal of overlap, he thinks. Students and sailors, both thrown together by circumstances and forced to find ways to get along, to develop rituals and traditions and mythologies to make their days meaningful. The kids, as they always did, sprint toward the great unknown with abandon, chalking up firsts, drowning in waves of emotion, holding onto each other in the vain pursuit of a static existence, a time and a place carved out of the relentless and set aside to live in forever and ever amen. He envies them as much as he is worried for them and this has as much to do with why Phillipe decides to tell them his story as anything else.  

They ask, of course. Phillipe would never force the story unasked on anyone, especially those who need their sleep to succeed in their daytime life. 

“So where are you from?” is always the first question that gets asked. Phillipe’s accent has faded over the years – a concerted effort on his part – but it creeps back when he says “Toulon.” He can be remarkably gregarious on occasion, but he tends to clam up when it comes to his past, and this is usually enough to dissuade them from pressing him further. The Ocean City kids are the first that he goes all-in with; after he says “Toulon” he follows it with “I used to be a sailor.”  

Where to start, though? There’s a time and a place and a situation, and each is a complicated skein connecting everywhere and everywhen and right now. Start from the beginning, Phillipe. The girl with the funky little hat smiles encouragingly at him and he composes his face neutrally before he returns it. The beginning. There is a submarine, and a young shipman who hadn’t even earned his dolphin yet. It’s his first berth and it’s a hard adjustment to living in a diesel-powered metal tube with 52 other men. There is no privacy, for one thing; every body blends into its neighbors and the only thing separating one from the next is the occasional thin curtain walling off a coffin for a scant six hours of sleep. Every square inch of space on a submarine must be accounted for, so ‘close quarters’ undersells it by a lot. You eat meals together, you sleep together, you use one tiny jackleg toilet together, you try to stave off the maddening boredom together. There isn’t much oxygen, since it’s a massive fire hazard, so you breathe what you can and try to ignore that your main pipeline for more is a flimsy pipe sticking up above the surface of the water that could break off if you go too fast while it’s up. 

That’s the situation, but it needs proper context. Place and time are intimately bound up, so he can knock off both at once. They called it the Summer of Love, the summer of Sgt Peppers, but for Phillipe and the others it was a summer on patrol, creeping near the bottom of the Mediterranean and trying to get intel on everyone: the Egyptians, the Israelis, the Soviets, Franco’s Spain. We weren’t in the middle of a shooting match, of course; the Americans had inherited our little mess in Viet Nam and we were busy pretending we had nothing to do with it.  

I can see them wavering; they live in a brave new world, these Ocean City evergreens, a world where the Soviets are part of their half-remembered childhoods and they’ve come through to the end of history. They know about rap, about William Jefferson Clinton, about money to be made in the weird Wild West of the internet. Phillipe doesn’t know much about that and the kids don’t know about what it felt like to see the end of the world emerging potentially every day from any number of places, some quite close to home. The gap there feels immense so Phillipe retreats, makes it simple. 

“I served on a submarine. French Navy, late 1960s.” They ooh and ah appropriately at this before one of them has the presence of mind to question why a French sailor is huddling around their fire along a classic American beach. Phillipe takes the question well, smiling wide and deciding to go all in this one time. 

“We spent all of the summer and fall of 1967 crisscrossing between Toulon and various waypoints of interest. It was quiet, for the most part. We were keeping a closer eye than normal on the other end of the Sea, since the Egyptians and their allies had gotten pushed back into the sand by the Israelis earlier in the summer.” 

He had no idea if they’d been taught about the Six Day War in school and frankly he didn’t care. It was just color, a setup to the real story. Please save all questions until the end of the tour. 

“Mostly we were making sure the Egyptians weren’t doing something stupid like laying mines in harbors. I was excited when we began but it became routine, you know? Go here, listen, report back that nothing was found. You learn to live in a dangerous, overgrown tin can without a moment to yourself. You learn to get by, but then,” 

And at this point one of the boys leans forward and offers him a can of beer. He accepts it gladly; he’s never grown fond of American beer but in the moment his mouth is dry and any liquid is a necessity. He drinks, composes, and begins again, a little more urgently. 

“Then I heard something.”  

Of course, it wasn’t just him. They would never let a first-timer man the sonar by himself. If it was, he’d have been telling different stories, in a different place: stories about how boring life on a submarine can be, maybe at a resort in the south, something near but not quite in Nice. He was just a runt, a puke, a kid training on the sonar system, learning what was an important aberration and what was just regular undersea noise. When he’d reported it the first time, the joke had been that Bordeaux had let one rip in the torpedo room that was loud enough to set off the system. When they got someone more senior to check the pings, there was nothing there. Good joke, who was pranking the new kid? 

Eighteen hours later, though, Martin heard it, just as large as I had, somewhat closer. They started paying attention, then; Martin was a dolphin, a long-time sailor, and he’d been operating a sonar rig on our sub since it had first been commissioned in 1958. He knew how to work it, he knew what things sounded like. He didn’t know what this was. It was larger than anything he’d ever heard, and he’d never heard another operator talking about this kind of thing, either. The captain held a closed meeting in his room and then there was no more talk on the subject. They whispered about it for a day before they were told subtly to cease. 

They didn’t hear it again on that tour. 

The kids are skeptical; what kind of story is this, anyway? Phillipe tries to think of how to explain the parts most deeply important to him. Sight is an ability that is easy to take for granted if you enjoy full, unabated access to it. These kids with their full eyes and their clear hearts might not really understand what it was like to be a bat swimming in the ocean; what it meant to find your way along by bouncing sounds around. To have to deduce your surroundings by abstract input. When you pinged off of something that was difficult to figure out based on the feedback, it was akin to seeing something inexplicable in the sighted world. Unsettling, to say the least. 

A few weeks in Toulon afterwards is a godsend; during that last shore leave in France he spent a lot of time banging around in bars and becoming one with a beach. In this sense he supposes that he can connect with his audience; stripped of the generational and cultural differences, it’s the same life. He lost his virginity on that trip; he doesn’t tell the kids that, of course, but he does pause a moment to savor that memory, the abandoned seaside hut, the sleeping bag, the warmth and sweat of the morning. 

When he got back in the submarine with the rest of them, they embarked on the next tour. The longest tour, and the last. 

They went out listening again but found nothing to listen to. The Mediterranean was oddly quiet, even as the noise back home was really starting to ramp up. They did the rounds and headed home after Christmas, ready to be able to stretch their limbs and not be pressed cheek to jowl with men for entire days at a time. Phillipe pauses here and looks down at his hands. They are strong, big-knuckled, brown from a life of living and working out in the sun. He still sees them differently, though: pale, frail, streaked with blood. Can he finish this story? He looks up and the Ocean City kids have grown silent. They lean in, hanging on this seemingly dramatic pause, and so Phillipe gathers himself up and forces himself to continue. Despite himself, he grins at them. 

“It was a dark and stormy night.” 

Above them, on the Mediterranean Sea, this is true. It is night, and bad weather has been rolling across them for two straight days. The sub is not immune to the rolling of the water and balance has been difficult; the mood of the men has deteriorated quite a bit and it’s only instilled discipline that keeps them from clawing at each other. The fact that they are only perhaps two hours from Toulon keeps them calm, but even that has an anxious edge to it. Two days prior, an Israeli submarine disappeared in home waters. The men wait for the signal that the balloon has gone up, grimly certain that it will before they reach home (or, worse, a few hours after). 

“I’ll be in bed 15 minutes when the call comes,” the torpedo chief says, “just starting to dream about Martin’s wife.” Everyone laughs. The tension lifts a little. They all hear it, in the vacuum that happens after. Slithering is the closest word he can think of in English, but it doesn’t do the sound justice. It doesn’t convey to these kids the way the sound of rubbery, slippery flesh slid along the metal of the sub’s hull, the way it seemed to climb right up into your ears and pitch a tent. This, followed by the creaking of the hull. 

The hull normally creaks, more or less depending on the pressure exerted by the depth the sub is operating in. It’s part of the background, at least in the subs Phillipe has worked in. The newer nuclear subs, maybe they don’t creak as much. Phillipe has never had the opportunity to find out. This sound, though, was different; it sounded more like the submarine had suddenly dropped to a much lower depth. The slithering, then the creaking. As though the ship were being squeezed.  

“The radar operator started going nuts,” he tells his rapt audience. “Lost it completely. Raved that it was like we just got wrapped in a solid cloud. None of us knew what to say. We all just looked at each other.” 

He leans forward for dramatic effect. Is he enjoying this? He suspects he might be. The kids all lean in as well, as though he is about to whisper the core truth of the universe. 

“Then the ship started moving.” 

This is an understatement. At one second, they are caught in some strange, enveloping trap, the kind that creeps across the hull and brings up the oppressive level of the crush. At the next, they are thrown into the walls; not hard enough to break anything, but hard enough to hurt. The noise of being pulled at high speed through the water was deafening inside of the ship, and when some of the crew began screaming it was indistinguishable from the rest. 

The kids are incredulous but they’re still paying attention; Phillipe’s problem now is that he’s tried very consciously in the decades since to forget what happened after and now he’s directly trying to bring it up. His heart is a mess – barreling along like a train going full tilt toward derailment, causing his throat to dry up and his palms to grow clammy. One of the kids thrusts a beer in his hand and he chugs it back without stopping to think. 

“It must have been a day and a half we were pulled through the water,” he gasps, setting the empty green bottle aside. “That’s a journey, I figured out later, that would normally have been two weeks at regular speed. It was much later that I figured that out. At the time it felt as though it would never end.” 

Not that things were better once it did stop. Despite the best efforts of the French Navy, scent carries strongly through a submarine and theirs stinks horrifyingly of vomit and shit. Who knew how deep they were, or if the snorkel was even still intact; there is no air circulation, so the stench lingers eternally, choking them even as they breathe the deep breaths of relief. Each of them is thinking the same thought – that in a few weeks at best, there will be no air at all. All of them breathe deeply regardless. 

A couple of the kids look as thought they’ve bitten into an apple only to find a pit of rot and corruption. Phillipe feels sorry for them, but at the same time he knows that they really have no idea. Their encounters with the nauseating have been, on average, at arms-length in comparison. He waits politely while each of them makes them decision to stay and listen to the end or not. He does not blame any of those who get up and walk off down the beach into the night. He would, were the situations reversed. Seclusions, daring, and wet slippery flesh sound infinitely better than his tale of splattered puke and desperate men. 

The ones who stay gather in closer, open fresh beers, and steel themselves. Phillipe looks at each of their faces; here and there he detects a certain good-natured wariness, as though they suspect that they’ve been listening all along to the ramblings of a hobo, or perhaps an escaped mental patient. Phillipe doesn’t blame them for this, either; it’s already a fantastical story and Phillipe hasn’t even finished yet. 

“So where was I?” he muses aloud. In his mind he is thinking of breathing, of sucking in oxygenated air in large quantities, of knowing that he’s accelerating a catastrophe and breathing deeply anyway. “We checked over our systems,” he tells them, “and realized that some of them were now junk. The sonar still worked, but it was spitting out aberrations. Like we were still wrapped in something, or that we were surrounded by other objects, or who knows what. The captain ordered a closed-doors meeting but we could hear their discussion. Men under extreme stress can be very loud.” 

The officers refuse to speak on their discussions when they leave the captain’s chambers but this situation does not last. The men are beaten up, they’re exhausted, they’re frightened. To their credit, a whole eighteen hours pass before the first officer gets pummeled in the mess hall. The adrenaline and anxiety lead to a kind of desperate bravado, and the torpedo officer loses three teeth shortly; looking to stem the tide, the captain calls an all-hands meeting and lays out the situation. 

“They had no idea where we were,” Phillipe tells the remainder of his audience. “Or how far we had gone, or what was wrapped around us, or what we were supposed to do.” He smiles and looks down at his feet. “They thought honesty was the best way to deal with us. They forgot that submarines are a particular breeding ground for panic. There’s low oxygen levels naturally, out of necessity; without access to fresh air, there was even less than normal. One side effect of low oxygen levels is that people get angry, quickly. Life on a submarine requires you to have a certain psychological profile, an ability to keep a lid on your frustration until you can vent it in a safe, appropriate place. We were all selected for this trait, but suddenly we were in an extreme situation. There was nowhere to, as I said, vent it.” 

He studies his hands in the firelight, turning them over, following furrows of dirt through the knuckles. 

“We kept a lid on it for as long as we could.” 

There is whistling in the hallway and Phillipe is crouching just out of sight, a dented pipe in his skinny fist. There are dark, putrid stains in the hollow places of this pipe; there is hair and unspeakable other substances. The air is hot, charged. It takes a great deal of effort just to breathe in the air; Philippe strains at it, like moisture from a rock. The whistling comes closer and the sound of it is like broken glass in his spine. He grits his teeth in agony and lives an elaborate daydream wherein he bludgeons the whistler to death and then laughs wildly over the pulped corpse. 

It’s just baby-faced Dominique, though, and Phillipe throws the pipe aside. He can’t kill Baby-Face, even in these circumstances. There’s been too much death already. It’s everywhere. The ship stinks of it. 

“Eat me if you want,” Phillipe says. “I don’t care anymore. I’d rather nourish you than continue to starve myself.” 

Baby-Face doesn’t want to eat him, though. Yet, anyway. He has one more plan. He is famous for plans. Once, at shore leave in Rome, he had been rolled for his pay by a gang of hooligans and before the next sunup had convinced two taverns of belligerents to pincer the hooligans in their lair and raid all of their stolen treasures. His plan now is less tactical, more panic-stricken: launch off the remaining torpedoes, don the scuba suits, and make for the surface. They would be somewhere in the Atlantic, in theory, hopefully close to a shipping lane. If not, Baby-Face declared with the ruddy, hopelessly insane face of the fanatic that at least they would die under the wide open skies like honest men.  

“I couldn’t think of anything better to do,” Phillipe tells the kids. Honest men. 

At first everything goes according to plan. Then things become exceedingly dicey. Phillipe wants to tell these kids, these earnest Springsteen archetypes, that if they take nothing else away from this story they should take that. 

The torpedoes fire and they hit something close by; the shock wave of the explosion rocks the ship and while both Phillipe and Baby-Face manage to brace themselves they hear faintly the sounds of rage and surprise elsewhere in the ship. Part one of the plan goes off well, at first. On their way to fulfill part two – the scuba suits – the ship suddenly lurches sideways. Phillipe and Baby-Face go full-force into the wall. Phillipe, through sheer force of will, manages to grasp ahold of a handle and it is for this reason alone that he avoids Baby-Face’s fate. The ship continues to swing back and forth, and despite Phillipe’s anchor he hits the wall painfully several times. Baby-Face fares far worse; he is slammed into the hull without mercy and, when the ship is turned completely around he falls through the hallway into the blackness. Phillipe hears him hit a door frame, but afterwards there is no noise or sign of his shipmate.  

When the ship finally settles, Phillipe crawls along the floor toward where the suits are kept. It takes him a moment to realize that the rushing sound he’s hearing isn’t the blood in his ears but is external and present and urgent. The hull has been breached and the cold ocean is pouring in. His hands and his legs are wet, and already going numb with the chill. He makes it to the room with the suits and when he stands the water is up to his knees. He is halfway into the suit when the ship lurches again, and the horrendous sound of metal being torn fills his ears. Screaming, he zips himself up and slams the helmet down onto his head. The oxygen tank is full but he doesn’t have the time to check if the hoses are properly fixed. The water rushes up over his head a moment later; his breathing seems fine, so he propels himself forward into the sudden darkness. 

The light is dying everywhere as the electric lighting blows under the force of so much water. Corpses, unmoored from the floor by the intervention of the ocean, float past him; the looseness of their limbs makes it look as though they are reaching out to him, in supplication or in greed he isn’t sure. Beyond them is more of the same: more hallways, less light, more corpses floating past him, the endless parade of losers in the only race that matters. There is another of those horrendous sounds of metal tearing, although now it is more felt than heard; shockwaves through the water, and then a new current that drags Phillipe along. He lets himself be drawn, a ragdoll through a rip tide, sucked through the last of the dying submarine and then out into whatever comes. 

The kids aren’t stupid. Never that. They look at him and cock their heads, trying to figure out what the hell the weird dude is on about. Eventually one of them asks the question. 

“So what was it?” 

Phillipe flows out into the greater wide ocean and is amazed. The light is beautiful, and it is everywhere. Soft, blue, and seemingly alive; he can see around him with much more clarity than he’d ever expected.  

“When Columbus sailed into the Sargasso Sea, his crew saw strange lights in the water. They were deeply disturbed and prayed fervently for God to end their tribulations. God granted them their prayer and brought them to the land; in doing so, he set in motion greater tribulations, for an unknowably large number of human beings. Such is the mysterious, strange work of which He is known for. The lights, though, I can tell you about. In the depths, there are living creatures, plants and otherwise, that generate their own light. Bioluminescence.” He sees that some of them have paid attention through their final years of high school and are nodding along. “The Sargasso Sea is famous for the weeds it grows, and some of them glow with their own simple light.  

He sees other ships, some wooden, some metal. All of them are rent in some fashion, torn open and tossed upon the ocean floor like discarded broken toys. The strange blue glow shows every dent, every tear; he gapes at them for a moment, transfixed, before he begins to claw his way upward, toward the surface and whatever might be there.  

There is a thrashing in the water below him, and as he turns to see it he regrets his decision immediately. The thing is impossibly large, an amorphous shadow-blob floating malevolently near the ocean floor. Phillipe has seen octopuses in pictures before, but while this thing resembles an octopus it has far too many arms; its tentacles writhe around its base like thin black snakes, reaching and grasping and whipping through the water. Several of them are bleeding. A red cloud billows out from the thing, obscuring a quarter of the thing’s base. Got the bastard Phillipe thinks viciously, and as he thinks this the thing’s eyes flare open and for the barest second Phillipe knows that he is staring directly into the eternal fires of Hell. They train onto him and he knows then what it feels like to be a mouse caught out under the shadow of the hawk. He scrambles upward, climbing with a level of energy that shocks him. He can feel the thing moving below him, pushing the water at a rate that nearly causes him to spin out of control. He is breathing in spurts, grimly aware of the finite level of his oxygen tanks.  

“I surfaced in the middle of a calm, clear night. There were more stars than I’d ever seen in my entire life, whirling overhead. It was…” he trails off, looks at the eyes of the remaining kids. “It was gorgeous, and maddening, and utterly terrifying.” 

He treads water as much as he can, keeping himself afloat in the middle of a wide ocean with no land in sight. Night turns into day and Phillipe waits for the thing to come to the surface and drag him back down into the eerie glow of the ocean floor. It never does; the thing must have been too badly hurt to attempt it. He pictures himself losing his strength and slipping beneath the waves to his doom, but before that occurs a cargo ship manages to spot him improbably against the backdrop of sea and sky. When they ask him about himself he spins a story about being a recent landed immigrant in the United States that took a pleasure cruise on the wrong ship and ended up stranded in the open water. It’s a grim enough tale, and so there’s very little questions sent his way by the American crew. They’ve heard stories about people going overboard never to be seen again, and they count themselves as heroes for having rescued one of them.  

“So I made it here, to the U.S.,” he tells these Ocean City teenagers. “Hit the ground running and never looked back. I’ve worked odd jobs up and down the East Coast.” 

“Damn,” one girl says. “If it were me I’d never go near the water again.” 

Phillipe laughs and accepts another beer. There is a certain sentiment he wants to convey to her, but he cannot find the words. There is something about the ocean that draws him, a certain scent, a certain feel, a certain tugging; the way the salt seems to breathe out of the ocean, settling on his skin and marking him as belonging to those waves. He rarely goes swimming and he never goes out on ships, only on boats that hug the coast. He knows, without knowing exactly how to express it, that if he ever sinks below those wide open waves again, it will be the final time. 

There are other things he wants to tell them, warnings and admonishments and pleadings from a deep, frightened part of himself. He wants to tell them about the spate of missing boats that occurred one summer in a rambling stretch of the Georgia coastline; about the deep grooves carved into the sand one morning outside of Surf City, North Carolina; about rumor and conjecture and dark mutterings from the locals in seaside Maine villages. He wants to tell them that he knows when he’s outstayed his welcome somewhere; that he knows when the strange marks show up in the sand, like a thousand twisted tentacles clawing blindly at the coast, he must move on. Otherwise, he wants to scream at them, he’ll find himself on a lonely stretch of the beach at three in the morning, the witching hour, facing out toward the ocean, waiting.  

After they get over the story, the kids of Ocean City go back to their lives, living out the urgent mythologies of the American Dream. Phillipe recedes into the background, a story that they will tell nostalgically a decade or two down the road, at a high school reunion, or over coffee with an old friend. He gets up from their fire, wanders off down the coast, keeping an eye out to avoid lovers in the warm summer night. Beside him, his old friend the ocean crashes ceaselessly into the land, thrumming and calling to him with sweet tones and salty breath to join her in one final embrace.  

This doesn’t have to be the end! Click below to explore some other titles by Trevor James Zaple, and don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter via the form below to keep up to date with new stories, free stories, and deals deals deals!