“Sis?”

The heavy, metal door to the kitchen food closet swings open, Ernie gripping the handle and shoving it aside. In his hands, he holds a small plate of food, half of a chicken salad sandwich. He peers inside, the speck of light from the nearby stovetop casting long, black shadows into the pantry.

Jessica sits in the corner, head down, her knees pulled up to her face. She doesn’t respond to her brother’s entrance, doesn’t so much as move from her spot. On the shelf nearest the door rests a different plate of food leftover from earlier that morning, still untouched.

Ernie picks up the plate, replacing it with the new one.

“You gotta eat something,” he says. “I know it’s tough to keep down, but you have to try.”

Still, she makes not the slightest sound or movement.

“You must need to use the bathroom at least, come on, I’ll walk you over.”

Again, nothing.

“Jessica, come on.”

Ernie steps forward and crouches next to his sister. There’s a metal pail next to her, the scent of bile drifting out of it.

He grimaces. “Too sick to eat, then? Okay, but I still want you to try if you feel a little better, otherwise, you’ll waste away. And if you ever need anything, I’ll be right outside, just knock.”

He picks up the bucket and carries it to the door.

“I’ll be right back.”

Shutting the closet behind him, Ernie leaves the mess hall, carrying the bucket to the bathrooms down the hall. For all his talk, he hasn’t eaten all day either. Though he’s up and about, his stomach rejects anything and everything he puts in, even water. His head is pounding from dehydration, and every step is pure exhaustion with how little energy he has. But his sister is suffering even more, he can tell. To see her in such a state, he forces himself to look stronger for her. He wants to say something, do anything, to help her, offer her some sort of hope, but he knows he can’t. He didn’t blame her for what she did, he couldn’t. She was his sister, and given the circumstances, he wasn’t all that surprised that she thought it would be a mercy. He didn’t agree, but he did forgive. Still, even offering those words did nothing to change his sister’s state. Jessica wasn’t looking for forgiveness, she didn’t regret her actions. She wasn’t shutting down because she felt bad about what she did. That scared him. Not because he thought she would try it again, but because it seemed that after her failure to accomplish what she set out to do, she’s just stopped.

Opening the bathroom door and dumping the contents of the steel bucket down the toilet, Ernie wonders if his sister can even hear him at all. From how she had spoken ever since Julia showed up, he knew she was spiraling into a dark place. Her thoughts had been morbid and disturbing. It made him wonder if her inactivity was coming from having given up and fallen into a depressive whirlpool, or if the circumstances and her crazed thoughts had actually broken her. He couldn’t avoid thinking the worst, and being honest with himself, he felt the tug of similar dark thoughts himself. His own mind was now whirling with possibilities he, until just days ago, would have thought the realm of fantasy and myth. Images of evil horrors in film and literature chipped away at the rational science in his mind. The more he thought about Julia, the less she made sense, and that could break anyone.

Leaving the bathroom--bucket as clean as he could get it in the dark--Ernie can’t help but linger on his sister’s words. She characterized Julia as a purposeful tormentor. Not just a simple beast, but a malevolent creature who actively sought to do them harm. He wished Jessica would respond to him, not just to assure him that she was alright, but to help him understand. He wanted to know what she saw, why she believed what she did. At the end of the day, before any of this happened, she was a scientist like him. They thought the same way, and before it broke her, she must have come to understand something that he was still missing. He couldn’t believe that his sister would have thought the way she did without proper reason and the truth was nobody knew what Julia was. Her behavior and even her appearance were complete mysteries. Ernie wasn’t quite ready to believe she was an evil being, but he was ready to learn, and imagined that perhaps knowing the truth would be better than staying in the dark.

Returning to the mess hall, Ernie reopens the closet. His sister hasn’t moved an inch and he puts the pail back where it was.

Before he leaves, he looks at Jessica again. “I’m gonna figure this out, Jess. I promise I’ll find out what’s really going on here. Just hang on. We’ll get out of this, together, like we always do.”

The door swings shut, and Jessica is left alone in the pitch-black closet.

After a moment, Jessica stirs. In the dark, she lifts her head, tears running down her face. She whispers a single word: “Don’t,” then curls up in a ball on her mattress and sobs into her pillow.

***

It’s late in the night, but there are still a lot of people up and about in the Narwhal. Ernie had been hoping to wait until more people were asleep, but nobody lived by the clock anymore, and he couldn’t wait. He takes an uncertain step into the torpedo room. It’s empty, the two sailors who were in charge down here are thankfully some of the few not around at the moment. Having been down in this section of the submarine only once before, he’s unfamiliar with it and down here there isn’t a single trickle of light to guide his steps. He swallows and it feels like there’s something lodged in his throat as his fear tempts him to flee the lonely and dark room. Still, it’s the best place for him to try what he’s out to do. With radiation sickness and exhaustion crippling those onboard, scientists and sailors alike are out of commission and the lower deck he stands on now is empty.

With the privacy he desires, his careful steps guide him to the far wall and he places his ear to the cold metal beside him. Outside the ship, he hears the subtle current of water running against the hull. The current is unnatural, perturbed, changing direction and strength in ways that normal water doesn’t move under the power of its own currents. It’s Julia, he knows, moving just beyond the steel walls.

The creature doesn’t leave the Narwhal’s side anymore. Though she remains quiet and sometimes moves a short distance away, all it takes is a single ear to the ship to confirm that she’s still there, that she’s always there. Why would she do such a thing? Why she would do anything she’s done in days since the crash are questions Ernie has come here to answer, or at least to get closer to.

If he was being honest with himself, Ernie didn’t actually want his questions answered. If his plan didn’t work, if he learned nothing, then he could go on blissfully assuming that his sister was wrong, that Julia was nothing more than an animal. But if his experiment worked, then he would have to begin seriously considering that Jessica could be right, that Julia was not a mere beast, that it was a thinking, intelligent being, and that her actions had meaning, intention, behind them.

The plan, as he formulated it in his head, clouded as it may be, is to try to communicate with Julia. Days back now, Max had knocked on the hull of the ship three times and Julia had knocked three times in kind. Nobody spoke of it, but Ernie knew it was on his mind ever since, and he was sure it had been sitting in everyone else’s as well. The idea that she had responded, that the returning bangs she sent to them were more than just coincidence was scary, and he was hoping that it was simple pattern recognition, something plenty of animals could do. He needed to know though and intended to test that.

Taking a deep breath, pushing down his anxieties, the fear telling him to go back to bed, Ernie clenches his fist and pounds on the wall. He starts with the already established pattern, three knocks in succession. If Julia responded, he could safely assume that the first time had not been a simple coincidence and he could move on to something more complicated.

For a while, there is no response. He puts his ear back to the hull of the ship and listens to make sure Julia is still nearby. He hears her moving, but it’s different from before, perhaps closer, or faster, but definitely louder. He pulls his face back and waits.

Knock, knock, knock.

Ernie jumps when he does get the response he’s fishing for, both because it startles him, and because of just how close it is to him. To his ear, Julia had not just indiscriminately knocked on the Narwhal, but she had found and tapped directly on the opposite side of the wall from where he now sat. Not only that, but it was a quiet knock, not the violent and loud response Max had gotten but delicate. It felt, to Ernie, personal, in a way.

Taking a deep breath, Ernie moves to the next logical step. He changes the pattern, knocking four times with a pause between the second and third.

Knock, knock.

Knock, knock.

Julia responds, and Ernie takes a deep breath. His mouth feels sticky and his throat tight. The thick, humid air makes it feel like he’s trying to breathe through a pillow. It’s far from the most robust of experiments, but he can now assume that Julia is, at the very least, smart enough to recognize and repeat patterns. But a dolphin, an octopus, or any number of animals could do the same, so he continues.

Taking things up another notch, he takes a dead flashlight from his side pocket and uses it to bang on the wall three times instead of his balled fist. It produces a hard clang as metal strikes metal and Ernie waits to see what Julia will do.

Bang, bang, bang.

It takes the creature a while, but she does return with a repeat of his pattern and changes the sound in the same way to match his. She’s used something hard to hit the side of the Narwhal now, perhaps a bony appendage from her own body, a chunk of ice from the seabed, or even a broken piece of the submarine. She’s smart enough to recognize the difference in sound, and understand how to reproduce it all without seeing how it was done.

Ernie bites his lip--feeling a bit of bile rising in his throat--and moves on. He couldn’t stop now. This time he changes tactics entirely. Ernie sings. Opening his mouth, he sings a single note, held for a few seconds, then holds his breath as he waits for Julia.

What does return is unlike any vocalization heard from Julia before. The harsh, bellowing melody that it had demonstrated time and time again was gone, replaced by a gentle hum, still far deeper in pitch than Ernie’s own, but undeniably of the same tune and length.

Ernie bites the inside of his cheek. Leaning against the wall of the submarine, he shakes his head, having hoped to not even get this far.

“What are you?” he whispers in the dark.

And on the other side of the wall comes the sliding sound he and everyone else has heard before. She was touching the outside of the Narwhal now. To his ear it was a curious sound, though he didn’t want to overly anthropomorphize yet, the way she touched the surface, moved along it, felt to him like she was trying to learn, searching for something.

“What the hell is going on down here?”

A light shines into the torpedo room. Ernie shields his eyes and once they’ve adjusted, he sees the faces of the two torpedo crew members, Rat and Carter, that he sort of met when his sister came to this same place. They hadn’t been asleep, and now they caught him.

Ernie rubs the back of his neck. “Sorry, just me.”

“And what are you doing?” Rat asks. “We heard noises up above, sounded like they were coming from down here.”

“Yeah, uh, that was me,” Ernie replies, trying not to say too much.

Carter shakes his head. “Did we not all agree a long time ago that trying to stimulate that thing out there in any way was dangerous? I thought we were trying to keep quiet in here.”

“I know,” Ernie says with a sigh. “I just--you’ve gotta be curious too, right? About what the hell she is? I just--I just would feel more comfortable knowing.”

The pair of submariners step inside, their faces empathetic. Carter walks up alongside Ernie and looks at the wall.

“So, what are you hearing?” Any chance this monster’ll get the fuck outta here?”

Ernie cracks a weary smile. “I never got your names,” he says. “Last we met, things were a bit hectic.”

“Yeah,” Rat says, “sorry about your sister.”

“No, it’s okay. She’ll be fine. The stress is just--she’s not used to dealing with it.”

Carter nods. “I feel that. Name’s Carter.” He extends the hand he does have to shake Ernie’s.

“And I’m Minnie, but you can call me Rat, everyone else does.”

“Ernie.”

“Well, Ernie,” Carter replies, “you seem to have all your marbles--” he stops for a moment, “ah sorry. Don’t mean to offend.” He clears his throat. “You seem innocent enough, but I don’t know if the captain’s gonna wanna hear we let you keep this little science experiment going, so why don’t we head on back up.”

Ernie nods. Figuring he’d rather not keep going and cause tension, he allows himself to be satisfied with what he’s learned and starts walking out of the torpedo room. Rat walks ahead of him. Carter takes another moment, he presses his ear to the wall, listening to the same noises Ernie heard before, the sound of Julia caressing the outside of the Narwhal.

He shakes his head and turns back to the exit. “Weird shit, man.”

And then, entirely without warning, and before he can take a single step to join up with Ernie and Rat. There’s a loud popping sound in the room, followed by a torrential spray of water. Ernie and Rat spin around to see a massive gush of water flowing into the room from one of the torpedo tubes. Seawater splashes into their faces and all Rat’s flashlight catches is water roiling in the dark.

“Dammit!” Rat shouts.

She steps forward, boots sloshing in water that’s already starting to pool on the floor. She lifts her free hand to her forehead, trying to shield her eyes from the frigid and stinging seawater. She moves toward the source and spots a vague shape moving along the wall.

“Carter! One of the tubes is open!” She shakes her head, trying to find her crewmate. “Open on both ends? How the fuck does that happen?”

She steps forward against the current, trying to find her way through the dark shower in front of her.

As she nears the tube on the wall, the dark blotch becomes clear through the splashing water. It’s Carter, stuck up to the waist in the torpedo tube, hanging onto the lip with his hand. His body is blocking most of the current, but the pressure is immense, strong enough that it should be forcing him right back out, but it’s not, and he’s struggling just to hold himself where he is.

“What the fuck?” Rat shouts. “Hang on, Carter, I gotcha!”

She grabs his feet and begins to pull, but still, he doesn’t budge an inch. As she pulls harder, her feet lose purchase on the watery, metal floor and she falls over onto her back, losing her grip in the process.

“Ernie! Can you hear me? Get over and help me pull him out!”

Ernie dashes over and grabs one of Carter’s feet with both hands. Rat stands up and grabs the other. The two pull with all the strength they have, but Carter remains unmoving, and his fingers start to slip from the grip they hold on the end of the tube.

“Fuck me!” Rat says. “Ernie, go upstairs! Get the captain!”

Terror is plastered on Ernie’s face, but he nods quickly and dashes out of the room.

Rat continues to pull as he leaves, but then she hears a cracking sound, and Carter slips an inch further into the torpedo tube. The spray of water tints red and Rat tastes blood as it sprays into her mouth. Forcing herself to look back into the spray, she sees that he’s lost his grip and she’s the only thing preventing him from being pulled out into the sea.

She doesn’t give up. Though her strength is waning, her body weak from the ailments accrued from her time on board, she tries to her last ounce of power to keep Carter inside the Narwhal. But there’s a yank from the other end, hard and fast. It’s stronger than the combined forces of her and the water pressure and Carter’s boot comes loose from Rat’s grip. He slides into the tube in an instant and vanishes.

By the time Ernie returns with Lewis, Rat sits on her knees in a couple of inches of water, her eyes locked on the now-empty torpedo tube. It’s closed--she shut it and stopped the flooding--but there’s nothing left of Carter except his boot, still in Rat’s hands.