The Salt-Stained Lullaby

The town of Haven's End was a place of salt-bleached wood and quiet resignation, a fist of rock and stubborn houses clenched against the Atlantic. Life here was dictated by the sea's moods, and death was a frequent, uninvited guest. We were accustomed to grief. But the grief that came that autumn was not our own. It was ancient, borrowed, and hungry.

It began with the humming.

My son, Leo, was the first I heard. A soft, melodic sound drifting from his room in the dead of night. It was beautiful, in a haunting, unfamiliar way—a series of rising and falling notes that sounded like waves sighing over shingle, like wind in rigging. I put it down to a tune from a new game or a show.

But the next day, he was listless. His cereal went soggy and uneaten. He stared out the window at the steel-grey water with a longing that made my stomach clench.

“What’s that song you were humming, sweetie?” I asked, trying to sound light.

He blinked, as if coming out of a trance. “What song?”

It wasn’t just Leo. As the town’s librarian, I heard the whispers. Mrs. Gable’s daughter sleepwalking toward her bedroom window. The Cooper twins found down on the beach at dawn, their pajamas soaked to the knees, blankly staring at the tide. All of them humming the same, strange, beautiful melody in their sleep.

The adults, hardened by generations of loss, dismissed it. A catchy tune going around the schoolyard. A fad. We were experts at rationalizing the sea’s strange effects on our children.

Until Jamie Miller walked into the ocean.

He was seven. They found his small, red jacket washed up in the cove the next morning. There were no screams, no signs of a struggle. The footprints in the wet sand showed a steady, deliberate path from his back door straight into the waves. His parents said he’d been humming the song for a week.

The town’s casual denial curdled into cold, sharp fear. Doors were locked. Children were watched with a new, frantic intensity. But the humming continued. It was a virus with no cure, transmitted in dreams.

My Leo was fading. Dark circles bloomed under his eyes. He moved slowly, as if walking through deep water. He’d press his small hand against the cold windowpane and whisper, “They’re so sad, Momma. They just want to make it quiet.”

The terror was a physical thing, a cold stone in my gut. But beneath it, the librarian in me stirred. A puzzle. A pattern. This was a story, and every story has a source.

I started in the archives, the small, damp room in the town hall basement that smelled of mildew and forgotten things. I looked for any mention of a melody, a tune, a mass hysteria. I found nothing but the usual ledgers of births, deaths, and fishing quotas.

The answer wasn't in the town's official records. It was in its scars.

I remembered a story my own grandmother had whispered, a tragic folktale about the *Sea-Sorrow*, an immigrant ship that had foundered on the Black Rocks in a storm a century ago. Most of the souls were lost, including a dozen women and children trapped in the hold.

I pulled the brittle, yellowed edition of the *Haven's End Clarion* from October 28th, 1923. The report was brief, clinical. *“Fifty souls lost. Twenty recovered. Thirty, including the women and children below decks, presumed claimed by the sea.”*

Presumed. Not confirmed. Their bodies had never been returned.

There was a box of effects recovered from the wreck, donated to the historical society and forgotten. It was mostly waterlogged paperwork and a few personal items. A sodden bundle of letters, tied with a faded ribbon. A small, wooden toy boat. And a leather-bound journal, its pages fused together into a single, warped block.

But tucked inside the cover, protected by the leather, was a single, loose sheet of paper. It was incredibly fragile, the ink blurred by salt water, but the musical notation was still faintly visible. Five staves, with a flowing, melodic line.

My blood ran cold. I hummed the notes under my breath.

It was the song. The exact, haunting lullaby.

With trembling hands, I carefully peeled apart the first few pages of the journal. The script was a elegant, feminine hand, though blurred and ghostly.

*“…the baby will not stop crying. The others join in. It is a chorus of misery in this dark, rolling belly of the ship…”*

*“…Anna has started singing an old lullaby from the old country. A desperate magic. ‘Hush,’ she sings, ‘the waves will sing you to sleep. Hush, the water is warm and deep’…”*

*“…the sound of the hull breaking is like the world ending. The cold. Oh God, the cold. I cannot hold him. The water takes him from my arms. I can still hear Anna singing, even as the water fills her mouth. ‘Hush,’ she sings. ‘Hush…’”*

The journal ended there. I sat back, my hands shaking, tears cutting tracks through the dust on my face. I understood now. They weren’t trying to drown our children. They were trying to comfort them. They were lost in the moment of their own terrible death, trapped in the hold, singing a lullaby to children who were already gone. A century of grief had given their song power, and it was echoing through the dreams of our children, mistaking them for their own.

Their love had transcended death. And it was a love that smothered, that dragged down into the silent, deep green.

I ran home, the journal clutched to my chest, the truth a screaming thing in my head. I had to tell someone. We had to do something.

But when I threw open my front door, the house was silent. Too silent.

“Leo?”

No answer.

I found his bedroom empty. The window was open, the cold sea air whipping the curtains into frantic ghosts.

A sound from downstairs—the front door clicking shut.

I flew down the stairs and out into the twilight. A small figure in blue pajamas was walking, with a steady, somnambulant pace, down the path that led to the shore.

“Leo! Stop!”

He didn’t turn. He was humming, the lullaby a soft, relentless drone beneath the sound of the surf.

Other doors opened. Other parents, their faces masks of the same terror, emerged. Their children were walking too. A silent, small procession descending to the water’s edge. They moved like tiny, weary pilgrims answering a call we could not hear.

We ran after them, screaming their names, our voices ripped away by the wind. We grabbed their shoulders, but they were impossibly strong, their small bodies rigid, driven by a will that was not their own.

The water was icy when it soaked through my shoes, then my ankles. The children waded in without a flinch, without a shiver. Their humming was louder now, harmonizing with the sigh of the waves.

And then I heard it. Underneath their humming. Another sound. A chorus of faint, watery voices, singing from just beneath the surface. The drowned mothers, singing their children home.

Leo was up to his chest now, his eyes fixed on the horizon, blank and peaceful.

“No!” I screamed, the word tearing my throat raw. I lunged forward, the water grabbing at my knees, my thighs, trying to pull me down. I wrapped my arms around his waist and pulled backwards with all my strength. It was like trying to pull an anchor from the seabed.

Other parents were in the water now, a desperate, sobbing army fighting an enemy we couldn’t see or punch. We wrestled our own children, fighting a love that was a century old and twice as strong as ours.

I looked into Leo’s face, so close to mine. “Leo, please! Fight it! It’s not you! It’s not for you!”

His humming faltered. For a second, a flicker of my little boy was in his eyes. A flicker of fear.

“They’re so sad, Momma,” he whispered, his voice barely audible over the waves and the distant, haunting song. “They’re so cold.”

“I know, baby,” I sobbed, holding him tighter as the waves tried to pry him from me. “I know. But I’m here. I’m warm. Stay with me.”

The song swelled, a beautiful, terrible promise of an end to loneliness. A final lullaby.

I did the only thing I could think of. I began to sing. Not their song. My song. The stupid, off-key nonsense song I’d made up for him when he was a baby, about a brave little lobster. My voice was broken, choked with salt water and fear, but it was mine. It was ours.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, his small hand gripped my arm. His other hand found mine. He wasn’t pulling away anymore. He was holding on.

One by one, the other parents joined in, singing their own silly, personal, living lullabies. Songs about superheroes and cartoon characters and winning baseball games. A cacophony of love and life, shouted into the face of that ancient, silent grief.

The children stopped. Their humming ceased. They blinked, confused, shivering violently in the cold water, starting to cry as the spell broke and the true terror of the deep water hit them.

We dragged them back onto the shore, collapsing into a heap of sobbing, trembling relief.

The town was quiet that night, every child safe in their bed, every parent watching them, too afraid to sleep.

The sea is quieter now. But sometimes, on still nights when the wind is right, you can hear it. A faint, beautiful, heartbreaking melody drifting over the water. A lullaby without a child to sing it to.

It’s a sound that never leaves you. A reminder that the most terrifying thing in the world isn’t hate. It’s a love that refuses to let go.