Chapter 3: The Drowned Log

Chapter 3: The Drowned Log

The house was a tomb, and the journal in Alex’s hands felt like its epitaph. The single line he had read—It’s safer when I wear it. But it never sleeps—was a key, unlocking a dread far colder and deeper than the simple fear of a bump in the night. The Watcher’s words, a clinical diagnosis of his terror, now felt like an understatement.

He sat at the dusty kitchen table, the swollen logbook open before him. The air was heavy with the scent of old paper, mildew, and the faint, unsettling tang of the sea. Each page he turned was a struggle, the warped paper stiff and fragile, threatening to crumble under his trembling fingers. The entries were not dated in any conventional way. Instead, they were marked by references to tides, storms, and the phases of a moon that Elias Mercer must have watched with a frantic, obsessive attention.

The first coherent entry Alex could decipher was a description of defiance.

Tried leaving it in the old bait locker. Nailed the door shut. Thought if I couldn’t see it, it couldn’t see me. Fool. The whole night, the house was full of water. Not real water, but the feeling of it. A pressure in the air that made my ears pop. Saw wet prints leading from the locker to the foot of my bed. Man-shaped, but too long, too thin. In the morning, the nails were rusted through, the wood of the locker was rotten and soft as sponge. It was sitting right on top. Waiting for me.

Alex’s blood ran cold. The wet footsteps. He hadn't imagined them. He was living out a pattern, a ritual of terror his grandfather had endured for decades. He read on, his morbid curiosity now a desperate need for answers.

A later entry, the handwriting more jagged, detailed another attempt at escape.

Dropped it off the Dogger Bank, a hundred fathoms down. Sent it back to whatever hell it crawled out of. Sailed back to port feeling lighter than I had in twenty years. Laughed for the first time I can remember. Slept a real sleep, dreamless. Woke up screaming. It was on my chest. Ice cold, covered in silt and brine, leaving a perfect, round stain on my shirt. It doesn’t just want a place. It wants a keeper.

The ring always returns. The words formed in his mind, a cold, hard certainty. This wasn’t just a cursed object he could discard. It was a parasite, and it had chosen its host. He flipped through pages that were little more than incoherent scribbles, descriptions of nightmares identical to his own—the lightless abyss, the crushing pressure, the cold touch from below. Elias had named the entity in his scrawls. The Drowner. The Echo. The Salvager’s Debt.

He described the rules, learned through decades of painful, terrifying trial and error.

Rule one: It must be worn. The ring acts as an anchor. When worn, the entity's presence is bound to the keeper, a constant cold weight on the soul, a whisper at the edge of hearing. But it is contained. Taking it off, as the Watcher had warned, severs that anchor. The entity becomes untethered, aggressive. It lashes out, searching for its keeper, its presence bleeding into the world around it, turning the house into an extension of its own lightless, watery domain.

Rule two: It cannot be destroyed. Elias wrote of taking an acetylene torch to it, the flame turning a sickly green and sputtering out against the brass. He’d tried crushing it in a shipwright’s vice, only for the hardened steel jaws of the vice to crack and shatter. Each attempt to harm the ring was met with a violent escalation. On the night he tried the vice, every mirror in the house had shattered simultaneously, and for a week after, he saw a tall, dripping figure standing just behind his reflection.

Alex felt a suffocating wave of despair. His rational mind, the part of him that clung to data and logic, was being systematically dismantled. There was no escape. No solution. His grandfather had been a prisoner in his own home for most of his life, bound by these same horrifying rules. The cold, quiet man from his childhood was not distant by choice; he had been hollowed out, consumed by a silent, unending war.

A sense of inherited damnation settled over Alex, heavy and cold. He had been so quick to judge the old man, to accept his mother's narrative of a bitter recluse. Now he saw only a victim, a man who had fought a monster for fifty years. But why? Why him? Why pass this nightmare on?

He turned to the last page of the journal. The writing here was different. The desperate, spidery script had collapsed into a barely legible scrawl, the indentations so deep the pen must have torn the paper. It was not a log entry. It was a confession. An apology.

It’s getting weak. Or I am. The bond is fraying. I can feel it searching. It needs a new anchor. It needs blood. My blood. For fifty years, I kept it. I fed it my warmth, my life, and I kept it from the world. I thought I could take it to the grave with me. I thought that would be the end. But it is older than graves. It is deeper than the sea.

It won’t let me die in peace. It whispers. It knows about him. About my boy’s boy. Alex. It shows me his face in my sleep. It promises me a quiet end if I make the introduction.

I fought it. God help me, I fought it. I locked my hands in fists so I couldn’t write. I bit my tongue so I couldn’t speak his name. But it has a hold on me now. A hold on my bones. My hands are not my own.

Alex’s breath hitched. His eyes flew across the final, terrible lines.

The package is addressed. The ring is in the box. I am not doing this. My hand is moving but it is not me. It is the ring. The debt must be paid. It needs a keeper.

Alex. Son. Forgive me.

It made me do it.

The journal slipped from Alex’s numb fingers and fell to the floor with a soft thud. The air rushed from his lungs in a choked sob. This wasn’t an inheritance. It was an infection. A curse, deliberately passed on. But the betrayal he felt was horribly twisted. His grandfather hadn't been a monster who condemned his own grandson. He had been a puppet, his last act of free will a desperate, failed attempt to protect his family. The ring itself—the entity bound to it—had reached out through his dying grandfather’s hand and chosen Alex.

The fear that had been a cold knot in his stomach now transformed into something else. It was a feeling of utter, hopeless entrapment. He was not just haunted; he was claimed. He was the next link in a chain forged in some lightless, forgotten depth.

His gaze drifted from the fallen journal towards the junk drawer. The crude brass ring was in there, waiting. It wasn't a choice to ignore it anymore. The Watcher's warning, the journal's testament, the wet footsteps in the hall—they were all a single, cohesive truth. The door was unlocked. And the thing on the other side was getting impatient.