Rust Beneath the Skin

The year was 1899, and the sea pressed itself endlessly against the coast of Whitcombe, a village where salt clung to the air and iron settled deep into every man’s bones. Fishermen cursed the waves even as they depended on them. Wives scrubbed clothes raw on the stones, while children hauled baskets of coal to homes already blackened with soot. And among them moved Clara Whitcombe, daughter of the late foundry master, who wore gloves even in the height of summer.

No one questioned her once, when she was small and pale and quiet. But as she grew, her habit became the subject of whispers. Those who had glimpsed beneath the gloves did not forget what they saw: veins darkened like corroded copper, skin flaking faintly as though touched by rust.

Clara had not always been thus. Years ago, a fever gripped her so fiercely that her father summoned doctors from three towns. When she recovered, it was with arms scarred by strange metallic veins that gleamed faintly in the light. Her father never spoke of it. Within a year, he was dead—crushed, they said, when the old foundry’s roof gave way. But villagers muttered that he had dug where no man should, dredging ores from the seabed that carried curses in their shine.

The rust did not stop with Clara’s hands. Each year it crept further, spidering up her arms, tracing across her collarbone. She hid it, yes, but she could not hide the faint metallic tang that followed her through the lanes. Dogs snarled when she passed. Infants cried at the sight of her. And in the still hours of night, Clara woke to the sound of chains dragging and doors groaning, as though something vast stirred in the dark beneath the earth.

When the first body washed ashore, no one thought of Clara. A fisherman, swollen with brine, his face half eaten by crabs. But when the second arrived—his chest marred with strange, reddish stains—the village grew uneasy. By the third, a boy of fifteen, his flesh splitting like brittle iron, suspicion sharpened. Their eyes turned toward Clara, who grew more withdrawn each day.

Unable to bear their stares, she climbed the cliffs to the ruin of her father’s foundry. The building crouched over the sea like a beast gnawing the waves, windows shattered, its furnace long cold. Rust coated every girder and beam, yet the scent of iron was stronger here than anywhere. Clara pressed her gloved hands to the great doors and felt a pulse answer her touch.

Inside, amidst beams and rubble, she found a ledger, its pages warped with damp. Her father’s handwriting filled the margins: sketches of veins branching into metallic roots, notes about a strange ore hauled from the seabed—an ore that never dulled, no matter the salt. A living metal, he had written. Resists decay. Hungers for vessels.

Her hands trembled as she turned the pages. The fever that nearly killed her had not been illness at all. Her father had bound the ore to her blood. She was not cured; she was claimed.

The dragging she heard in her dreams was no figment. It was the call of the source, still lying beneath the waves, patient and endless.

As weeks passed, Clara’s condition worsened. The rust spread visibly across her neck and face, cracking her lips until they bled faintly orange. When she scratched her arms, flakes of reddish dust clung to her gloves. She tried to scrub herself clean, but the water in the basin shimmered with metallic film.

The villagers grew bolder. Children hurled stones at her window. Men muttered that she had brought a curse upon them. Even the priest, who once blessed her, stepped aside when she walked by.

One evening, storm clouds rolled over the coast, and Clara, restless, wandered the shoreline. She thought of her father—his eyes fevered with ambition, his ledger filled with dreams of immortality at a terrible cost. She thought of the bodies that had washed ashore, their flesh splitting like corroded armor. She thought, above all, of the weight beneath her own skin, as though something vast and heavy pressed against her veins.

The tide surged higher than she had ever seen. Waves crashed against the rocks with the roar of iron chains breaking free. Clara felt her knees weaken. Beneath her skin, something moved—grinding, gnashing, like gears turning in the marrow of her bones. She fell to the sand, clutching her arms, and when she pulled away her gloves, she saw her hands were no longer hands at all. The flesh had hardened into ridged, metallic plates, cracked and bleeding orange dust where skin had split.

The sea answered with hollow thunder, and she knew then: the ore was no mineral. It was a parasite wearing the mask of metal, seeking host after host until it consumed everything it touched.

Clara rose. She could not go back to the village. Already she imagined their faces twisting with horror, their fear spilling into violence. She was a vessel, yes—but she would not be their curse.

As lightning split the sky, Clara walked into the waves. The water surged around her, bitter and freezing, but she did not falter. With each step, her body grew heavier, her joints grinding with unnatural force. The storm swallowed her cries.

By morning, the tide had receded. The beach lay scattered with driftwood and seaweed. Clara was gone.

In the weeks that followed, no more bodies washed ashore. The villagers whispered of deliverance, some calling it a miracle, others a bargain struck. Yet fishermen sometimes pulled strange fragments from the sea: shards of metal twisted like bone, scales that gleamed faintly red. And when they spoke Clara’s name, they swore they tasted iron on their tongues.

And on storm nights, when the tide battered the cliffs, the crash of waves carried a hollow echo, as though iron rang against stone in the depths below.