Story Spotlight: “Whispers of the Drowned” by Charles Eugene Anderson
November 1941. A British convoy pushes through the storm-tossed North Atlantic, and somewhere in the hold sits a relic that should have stayed at the bottom of the sea. In Charles Eugene Anderson’s “Whispers of the Drowned,” the ocean doesn’t just kill—it remembers. And what it remembers, it will not let the living forget.
The temperature in the hold dropped several degrees as I approached the crate. Madden pulled out a brass key and unlocked the iron bands. The wood creaked as he lifted the lid, revealing layers of straw packed tightly inside. Nestled within, like a heart inside a ribcage, was a much smaller box — dark, lacquered, and carved with writhing figures that seemed to shift in the shadows.
“The Siren’s Reliquary.” My voice came out as a whisper. The smell hit me first – salt and decay, like a bloated corpse washed up on shore.
Madden’s fingers trembled as he traced the ivory inlays. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
I stepped back. Beautiful wasn’t the word I’d use. The carvings depicted scenes of horror – sailors drowning, ships splintering, faces twisted in eternal agony. Even looking at them made my head swim.
A whisper tickled my ear, too faint to understand. I whirled around, but we were alone in the hold. The whisper came again, louder this time. Words in languages I’d never heard, yet somehow understood – tales of chains and whips, of stolen lives and broken promises. “Do you hear them?” Madden’s eyes had gone glassy. Sweat beaded on his forehead despite the chill. “The voices…”
About the Author
Chuck Anderson is a well-seasoned art student at MSU Denver.
Find out more about Chuck at chuckanderson.rocks
If you liked…
- The Terror by Dan Simmons—for its atmosphere of isolation, ice, and creeping supernatural dread aboard a doomed expedition
- The Devil’s Backbone (2001 film)—for its war-torn haunting steeped in human sorrow and moral reckoning
- The Shape of Water (2017 film)—for its lyrical exploration of what lives beneath the surface, waiting to be seen
Read the Story
“Whispers of the Drowned” appears in Haunted Waters, available now from Blackbird Publishing.
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