VOYAGE

Lost. There are many ways of being lost. You can be lost when you don’t know what to say or do. You can be lost when you can’t control your impulses but they control you. You can be lost when you lose your best friend, or lost in the middle of nowhere. You can lose your soul, and your sanity. Lost is a long, lonely voyage into darkness and despair. Lost is what you’re about to truly know and become. Yet sometimes being found is not the hand of rescue. It can be the devil's welcoming handshake, reaching out to pull you into hell—or the hand of a woman, vengeful and relentless, who might claim your very soul.

Everything was going just fine right up until the bad news.

“I can’t see anything. Can you?” called Marco over the roar of their boat’s twin diesel engines while peering outwards through his binoculars.

“Not a thing, sir!” answered First Seaman De Angelo from the starboard watch, searching ahead through his own glasses. “Any idea where we are?”

“Not a clue,” Lieutenant Commander Marco Aita answered, frustration in his voice as he lowered his lenses. He studied the thick fog surrounding them from atop their submarine’s coning tower with the certainty that something wasn’t right. “We shouldn’t be encountering fog in this latitude.”

“Feels like it was just waiting for us,” De Angelo replied.

Their submarine, the Morosini, had just finished its second Caribbean war patrol and they were on their way back to their base in France. They had been running on the surface now for several hours, the black waters flat calm as their twin screws propelled them ahead at their cruising speed of twelve knots. Yet they still had not come out of this perpetual mist which, by all weather science, should not even be here at all.

“So? Does being lost frighten you?” Marco asked De Angelo back with a hint of a brooding smile. For they were, indeed lost.

“Never seen fog like this,” said the sailor, his grip tightening on the railing.

Any other time, Marco would have agreed with him. The words were true enough. He had never seen fog this thick before either. It was not only unwelcomely timed when on their way home but unexpected to encounter in the warm month of August. It was as if the mist was silently watching them, like an old predator toying with a newfound prey.

“If we can’t see, we might as well submerge,” the seaman offered. “We have no business being on the surface out here in this.”

Camaraderie was important as there was zero room in the confines of a submarine for grudges or other personal issues. As a result, commanders were strict disciplinarians on anything to the contrary. Marco should have confronted him, but he didn’t. The sailor wasn’t questioning orders. He knew their orders. They were to run submerged. He was questioning Marco’s decision not to obey that order.

“Wherever here is,” he answered instead while adjusting the focus on the binoculars, hoping to pierce through the thick mist obscuring their surroundings.

Three hours ago, they had suddenly lost both the helmsman’s and the engine room compass. Each mysteriously spun uselessly. They had surfaced in order to get a fix on the sun, only to find themselves surrounded by this dense fog and unable to do so.

“What about your hand compass?” Angelo asked.

“Nothing. It’s useless.”

It felt to Marco like the compass had simply forgotten how to point, its needle too tired, too lost itself to find north.

Angelo frowned. “Isn’t that unusual?”

“Unusual enough to run on the surface when we don’t have a compass.”

The cool-eyed Marco had joined seaman Angelo on the topside watch, for they were, indeed, in a dangerous spot. Not being able to see was bad enough, but the final days of a patrol were the deadliest—the enemy knew they’d be heading home to Bordeaux. So they would lie in wait in its approaches to intercept them with planes, destroyers, and even other submarines. Thirty days, sixty days, or even ninety days out, they must eventually return to base to refuel and refit. The last three days were always the most dangerous.

This is a submariner’s greatest vulnerability. The closer one comes to returning home, the closer one comes to death. It is why they were to approach Bordeaux submerged just as the sailor said—to avoid being caught on the surface. Yet without a compass, both Marco and his skipper had agreed they should run on the surface to get a fix on the sun and Marco had volunteered for the watch to do so.

“Sir, is it safe to run surfaced?” De Angelo pressed, his earlier question unanswered.

Marco was being doubted and rightfully so. The other man obviously disagreed with his decision. Angelo held onto the bulwark’s steel sides so tightly, his knuckles showed white with premonition of his question. Despite his earlier “fog is fog” comment, being blind to everything about them wore on his nerves.

Doubt is the father of uncertainty.

Marco felt it too. The sailor was right. This was not a place to be. It wasn’t safe to run on the surface. At any moment, a freighter could come out of the ghostly mist and cut them in half or an enemy destroyer locate them by radar and sink them. Unable to navigate, they had two choices. They could either run surfaced or submerged. Submerged was safer, like the other sailor wanted. Underwater, they couldn’t be rammed or detected by radar. Yet Marco would not change his mind. Submerged, they couldn’t get the sun’s fix on their position. They wouldn’t know where they were and remain lost.

And they wouldn’t know their location until this fog, a wall as thick as cement, cleared.

Marco turned away to face the rail, face brooding. The enemy had to be smiling at their helpless plight. Surrounded by fog, they couldn’t tell where the sky ended and the sea began. Even the bow of their own boat disappeared into the grim gloom ahead as if devoured by it. The other man’s uneasiness came as no surprise to Marco. No one wants to sail blindly forward into God knows what.

Yet he still did not answer De Angelo’s question. Although the man intended to ask about it casually enough, something clearly bordered on nervous apprehension in his voice that came perilously close to fear. And it wasn’t just fear of the enemy, but of the fog itself. It felt wrong.

Privately, Marco shared his uncertainty, though he outwardly showed none of it. Whatever he felt, he would never show fear in front of a subordinate. Outwardly, the fog meant nothing to him but a temporary inconvenience. But inwardly? That he kept to himself.

For Marco knew well the other man’s conviction of certain dread. The son of an Italian school teacher and a man of science who had served three years in the Navy, Marco had seen fog before, but this was different.

This fog had an edge to it; that creepy, crawly sensation of not knowing what’s ahead or even what’s behind. It’s a feeling that you’re all alone but not alone. One knows there’s something out there. You can feel it. You just can’t see it. So you wait for it and you imagine the worst. You wait for that freighter or destroyer to come out of the fog and see Death in the face.

The oppression of their situation seemed undeniable. A vast blanket of suffocating whiteness hung over them. Even the green and white flag of Italy at their stern showed only as a gray specter. They were being swallowed, erased, and eradicated by this endless nothingness as if it had a will of its own.

Marco lowered his binoculars and held out his hand to watch it, wondering if it too would disappear in the mist. For a brief, dizzying moment, he thought he saw his fingers fade, bones showing through the skin.

He glanced at Angelo, who was still watching him, waiting for an answer to his question about submerging.

“We’ll stay surfaced for now,” he repeated.

Their conversation died quickly, as if afraid even a whisper would disturb whatever was out there, watching. A sense of an unknown threat had crept over them, and settled into their bones like a heavy, damp blanket, making them feel exposed to God knows what.

For three hours, they had been in this fog, each minute worse than the last, but now was the worst of all. They could deny it no more. They had no idea what direction they were steering in the middle of the Atlantic or for how long they might have been off course. He kept thinking they’d come out of this murky white air that seemed bent on choking them and yet they didn’t. It only grew worse.

Marco removed his compass from his pocket and gazed again at the useless instrument in his hand, wondering why none aboard worked. He might as well throw it away. One might fail, but all of them?

He told himself it was magnetic interference. It had to be. But that explanation didn’t sit—it slithered—not when three compasses were affected.

This wasn't interference. It was the absence of it, as if something far more powerful than nature had somehow erased Earth's magnetic north altogether. The idea of a supernatural cause crossed his mind, but he quickly dismissed it. They were men of science and war, not superstition.

Yet no matter how he held the compass, the needle never turned at all or simply wandered aimlessly back and forth. Normally, when a compass gets off course, it points to something magnetic aboard the boat. Yet this pointed to nothing at all.

And though he wasn’t cold, he felt himself shiver with an unexplained chill as he pocketed the useless piece. Even his binoculars were worthless now in this impenetrable whiteness surrounding them.

They would take the risk, God help them, remain surfaced, and accept the consequences.

“We need to find out where we are. Now,” he curtly said.

Their last known position—somewhere between Miami and San Juan—was worthless without a compass. They could be steering in circles without knowing it and probably were. His tension mounted. With every knot of speed the boat took forward, she seemed to have moved nowhere at all. He gave the order.

“Stop engines,” he called below.

Then he listened closely. Something was out there. He strained to catch that sound again—a chorus of faint whispers calling to them from deep within the mist, beyond sight and reach.

He could almost hear his own heartbeat echo in his ears as he waited. Each second stretched into eternity. The faint splash of waves against the hull—almost inaudible—while they waited for the diesels to shut down. His senses heightened to hear that eerie sound again—one that did not belong to the sea, hinting at something possibly far worse. What had he heard, lurking just beyond the veil of mist?

“What is it?” De Angelo whispered, watching Marco stare into the thick gloom. Marco raised his hand to silence him, as if he dared not answer for fear the fog might be listening back. He held his breath, straining against the oppressive fog to hear that sound again.