Stomach of the Seas

Written By: Ian Berling

1

The storm had come in from the North and worked the ocean into a frothing, foaming cauldron ready to boil over at any moment. Waves loomed, massive silhouettes framed in the skyline before collapsing in on themselves with the weight of an avalanche. Thunder crashed and rumbled thick and heavy, clattering like cannonfire in a battle of cosmic proportions.  Lightning danced wildly about the skyline, throwing its arms to and fro in its violent carelessness. Occasionally it would daintily place a foot down within the steely grey blue waters, transfusing a cresting wave with a brief glow of purple and white. 

Rain pelted the deck like tiny fists and rioted against the hull of the HMS Drayton, a rickety old wooden frigate with stinging force. The sails had been cut down earlier, the hatches all battened and all non essential crew clung to the walls and bannisters and anything else they had been lucky enough to bolt down ahead of time, nestling as well as they could deep within its bowels.

Jonah Darby clung to a bannister and prayed for dear life, clinging ever harder as the boat shifted again, this time nearly flipping entirely. He cried out as the ship rolled even further to the side. It took his feet clear off the ground and left him suspended in midair by the sheer strength of fear flowing through his arms as his hands tightened their steely grip. Crates smashed against one another, objects flew through the dark and more than one scream was loosed somewhere beyond Jonah’s dim vision.

He wondered dimly where the captain was, picturing the man being blown off the deck above and disappearing into the roiling wrath of oceanic doom. He wondered too if anyone at all was at the helm. It was Jonah’s first time at sea, and his first major storm to boot. The wind shrieked, loud and high and incessantly, like a banshee in the night, hair streaming and face screaming. 

The HMS Drayton was due to dock in Galway, Ireland in the morning, and when the storm had suddenly descended upon them they had been less than ten miles out from the shoreline. Jonah now severely doubted that anyone on board was ever going to see land again. It all seemed so hopeless. Not more than ten minutes earlier he had witnessed the awful death of Cabinboy Jenkins. The boy had been thrown free of the netting on the wall he had been clinging to and the upper half of his body had slammed into a rack of stowed crates with a resounding crack and a dense, vaguely wet popping sound. His lower half had swung madly forward and the momentum had propelled his thankfully unconscious body the rest of the way to the far wall in a smear of red. Jonah could see some of the Cabinboy’s teeth lodged into the crate, dotting the indent that remained as a testament to where his head had hit. 

The ship lurched heavily to one side again, this even time further than before. Jonah registered in his mind that he could see the blackened sky through the far windows, a bolt of lightning carved through the night. A mere instant later objects began to rain down around him. The screaming and rustling encircling him became deafening and he watched a loose board break off and impale itself through a man no more than forty feet to his left. The man died with a spasmodic kicking and a guttural gurgling. Chaos grew and swelled ripe amongst the crew as the ship continued turning, leaning precariously on an insane angle. 

For the briefest flicker of a moment weightlessness found itself settling into the pit of Jonah's stomach. His heart seemed to rise from his chest and into his throat as he felt vertigo start to settle strong. He realized he was very nearly resting on the ceiling.

Everything came crashing down, around and onto him with a sudden and shattering intensity. The floor rose to greet Jonah and he crashed face first, the world sweeping to inky black as he mercifully sunk out of consciousness and into the welcoming, open arms of utter darkness. The HMS Drayton floundered and capsized moments afterwards and the screams of the remaining crew were silenced as one.

The upsidedown ship broke, not cleanly in half, but into sections, the tips shorn off and discarded, the hull exploding on one side. It sank rapidly, trapping most of the crew with it as it plunged to the newfound graveyard waiting so far beneath it. Only a very few crewmembers found themselves lucky enough to have been expelled from the opened holes gaping at the sides and corners of the inner galley.The storm raged for most of the night, dispersing most evidence of the tragedy in all directions, making hope for any chance of help or detection an incomprehensibly bleak statistic. 

2

Jonah awoke to a dense fog blanketing the now becalmed seas spread empty and lazily about him. His arms were hooked into a set of ropes attached to a barrel floating amongst a smattering of debris and strewn wreckage. The air was heavy and dense to the touch and the stench of incense and sandalwood clung heavily to everything. A dull Sun rose far off in the horizon, but the fog had choked it off and made it seem even further away, distorting its hues to an unvarnished shade of grey. The waters seemed to be oddly tinged in a slight green, as if he had been marooned in the tropics.

The ocean waters sat completely still and silent, not a rolling of far off waves nor the squawking of seabirds came to Jonah’s ears. No current stirred or tugged at his feet. Most surprisingly of all, the bitter and often unforgivably cold waters of the Irish Sea seemed neither cold nor warm, but more like a bland, lukewarm bath. 

Jonah could not believe he was alive. He had no right to be, not when so many better and more properly prepared men seemed to have met their doom last night. He didn’t remember treading himself through the rope tied to that barrel. In fact he didn’t remember anything at all about the night or the storm after the ship had capsized after likely being thrown by a particularly large and deadly wave. The ethereal wafting scent of the incense bothered his nose and he sneezed twice in rapid succession. It was as he reopened his eyes after that second sneeze that Jonah noticed the body floating a few feet away.

Face down it lay, what skin was showing looked pale, fragile and transparent. Like the wings of a fishbelly white butterfly. Jonah paddled towards it, hoping to be able to identify the man and see if he had anything useful stowed away on his person. Reaching the corpse he noticed it had begun to bloat slightly, the hands puffy and enlarged somewhat as if the man had suffered from severe arthritis in life. He flipped it over onto its back and recoiled, gagging at the sight before him.

The corpse had no skin on its face. Just the raw red of exposed muscle and tissue and the streaked white of bone and the sagging yellow of cartilage. Empty, damp and sinewy sockets where the eyes and nose had once been now laid bare to the elements. There was no stench of decay at all, just that ever hanging pungent incense, sandalwood and possibly a hint of jasmine now intermingling. As Jonah’s stomach settled he decided to continue on with his check for anything that could be of use. He rummaged through the trouser pockets for a moment finding absolutely nothing other than a bone dry flask that he had tossed absently over his shoulder. It was as he reached around for the other pocket that he felt a clammy hand grasp his thigh. 

Jonah screamed, the sound echoing through the fog, bouncing and reflecting and amplifying to tremendous effect. He backed away, the scream not yet dead on his lips as the faceless corpse in front of him began to twitch and moan in a deep, inarticulate manner. Its head raised upwards and it took an exaggeratedly long and rasping gasp of air. Its sockets, still dripping with seawater locked onto Jonah’s eyes.

“Jonah, ye filthy bastard. How dare you outlive me. Keep your prying fingers to themselves, lest they be pried from your hands entirely, says I” it croaked at him, every few words being punctuated with a harsh, rasping gasp. “Harken now, for you, the living were never meant for this place. And the rest of us come. Cast yer gaze to the waters! Look now! Behold!”

As the corpse had said, so it was. Bodies began popping up out of the deep all around Jonah, many hundreds of them all surfacing in various stages of death and decomposition. Far, far more than had been housed in the HMS Drayton alone. They surfaced with kelp intertwined between skeletal fingers and trailing through clumps of hair. Tiny fish dropped from noses and empty eye sockets. Still more surfaced. They continued to appear in droves until all of the water within eyes reach was blotted out by rotting corpses of all the sickly hues of yellow and green and blue that could be produced by rot and the seas. Jonah was stricken speechless, mind reeling and he gaped uncomprehendingly at the sight before him. His mind inched ever closer towards utter madness as horror after horror dawned again onto him with each new rotting face he saw.

Eventually they seemed to stop appearing and stillness settled in again. As one, every individual corpse turned and cast their gazes towards Jonah. “You. Unlucky wayfarer in waters uncharted. Fate and uncertain happenstance have brought you here, to this junction between worlds.” the voices thundered in unison. 

They did not sound altogether unpleasant, but rather like all the natural sounds of the seas coming together to form words on inhuman lips. “You have been carried here, by the tides of tragedy to be deposited with us. The collected dead of all the oceans. This is the Stomach of the Seas. Where we, the waterlogged and doomed men of earth from all times past, near and furtively distant. We gather and rest, awaiting our watery judgement from those whom we choose not to name.” The voices carried the sound of sea foam, of tides on the coastline, of rocks and sand shifting in the surf. They boomed like waves on cliffs and surged with the pitterpatter of rain on water. 

Jonah blinked and gasped and still found no voice within himself to reply with. No words formed. His thoughts scattered and flew to the winds in a hundred myriad directions. He blinked again, eyes unfocused and hazy as if severely concussed. 

Ships and boats of all sizes and shapes quietly began to rise from the waters, calmly and silently enough to not cause the slightest ripple or disturbance. Seaweed covered masts slowly raised themselves into a full and ghostly splendor, shimmering slightly in the dense and aromatic fog. Dozens, and then hundreds of them. Corpses caught in their graceful rising stood atop decks and clung to mainsails and fo’cells and masts, crewing these ships of the damned once more.

The voices continued, now added to by the protests and groans of wood, forced unnaturally into likewise mimicking the human vocal cadence. “You will hear our stories. You will hear of our tragic passings, all of us, individually and together. You will carry them with you for all time. From this waking moment to your last. And we will free you of this place, but only if you grant us this boon. You, the man at the crux of all horizons, will carry the weight of our lives and the stories of our passing with you for all eternity. You will ascribe them to paper on your return to lands beginning. It is your duty. Lest we leave you here, to sit with us until death come unto you slowly. Where you will wake again, here still as one of us. To spend eternity waiting in our watery graves for the penance we so desperately desire and deserve. Carry our memory back to the living. Remind them that we once were.” They paused briefly, the silence groaning like distant thunder and hanging low overheard. 

“Pray now speak. Will you grant us this request? Will you seek your freedom with our guidance? What sayeth you?” They cried as one. Clumps of black mud leaked down from broken hulls in the pregnant stillness that followed before Jonah, still dazed and now driven near delirious with insanity, responded.

“I will do this. I will take this burden onto myself. Please. Please sacred corpses kept by our mother ocean. Please take me away from here. I beg it of you.” Jonah wailed the last few words, a rhythmless lamentation to his fate and sanity. 

As soon as these binding words had left Jonah's mouth, the corpses and their rotting ships all surged forward towards him. Arms outstretched, fingers grasping at air. Hundreds of thousands of words vomited forth from decaying mouths and through toothless gums. Millions more rained their way through Jonah’s mind and soul, pressing themselves into his memory, etching their very essence into the inside of his eyelids, to swarm unbidden before them evermore. Jonah blacked out and collapsed in a dead faint as the first of the corpses reached him. Lapsing into a thankful and blessed oblivion once more.

3

Jonah’s head pounded violently, his skull pulsating and radiating pain in tandem with his heartbeat. Slowly, gingerly he opened his eyes, wincing at the hurt brought on from salt cracked lids. The gleaming white of sterile walls graced his vision and Jonah gasped with relief at seeing the figure who sat before him. 

It was a doctor. A shabby and unkempt doctor, but a true doctor nonetheless. The man leaned forward and peered into Jonah's eyes checking the retinas for any signs of damage. Searching for whether sanity or madness lived in the mind of this mysterious man.  He cleared his throat and handed Jonah a glass of water, waiting for him to gulp it down before saying in a warm, caring tone.

“Well a fine morning my good man. You’ve given us all quite a bit to talk about here. Quite the scare I’m afraid to say. Here don’t talk, you need to conserve your strength for now. I will explain as best I can.” The good Doctor paused and reached into his front pocket, producing a hand carved pipe, already packed to the brim with brown dry tobacco. He lit it with a magically produced match and puffed until satisfactory with the burn and continued on, grimacing slightly and clearing his throat.

“My name is Dr. Waldon. You were found washed up on the shores here on the Isle of Shetland. It’s been three days now since some fisherman found you on the morning after that storm. They thought you dead and were horribly scared when you coughed up a stomachful of water onto one who had decided to run your pockets. They promptly fetched me and you’ve been here, in my private hospital ever since.”

Dr. Waldon paused and gave Jonah a look of deep concern and worry before continuing on. “I’m going to give you a light sedative here, to help you sleep restfully. You’ve been talking in your sleep you know? Muttering things about thousands of corpses in the water. Going on about the dead and the dying and many other fantastic and utterly nonsensical things of that ilk. It means that even when asleep, your mind isn’t at rest. That's going to make recovery difficult, wouldn’t you agree? Hence the sedative. Trust and believe, you are in good hands and all will make sense in time.  Now I’m going to leave you to rest, but please first, tell me your name and is there anything I can get you?”

Jonah blinked and coughed up a ball of phlegm streaked with coagulated red onto the floor before peering up  the doctor with glassy eyes and saying, “Jonah, Jonah is my name sir. Please I beg of you, bring me paper and pen, for I fear that I may not ever be able to rest well without it. Whatever writings I may have produced overnight you may either read or burn at your discretion. There are stories that are in most dire need of telling, and I won’t be left good enough alone until I've told them all as honestly and accurately as I may.” 

With this Jonah lay his head back once more against the comfy, white pillow. He raised his head once more and called to the now woefully perplexed doctor, “Could I please have a little more water Doctor. Drowning seems to me a most thirsty business.” The slightest traces of a grin etched themselves against the very corners of his cracked lips.

Ian Berling shares a hometown with Rod Serling. He has been an artisanal pizza maker, a fairly skilled cook, and a very jolly convenience store clerk. He plays the drums (badly) and has been collecting horror literature and obsessed with horror films since he first stumbled across Goosebumps and the SciFi channel as a child. His first story was published in The Slash Media magazine Issue #2 in March of 2026 with two others to be featured in the anthology Horror en America and Beyond out June 15th, 2026 through Barrio Blues Press and another to be featured in the Station 3 anthology through Paw&Claw Ink later this summer. He lives with many cats and two dogs, one cat sized and one not.