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The Witch in the Whale Bone Hut

by B.C. Kelsey

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Four massive ribs held the hut together, two forming a thick arch near the front door. The bones were pockmarked and yellow, no doubt leftovers from the town’s glory days during the height of the whaling industry.

Jamie’s heart sank as he stared at the bones. They had once belonged to a beautiful creature, needled to death by harpoons and stripped of its skin. As he passed under the arch, he found himself wondering what that whale had seen all those years ago, swimming through depths he would never reach. Whatever it had seen or thought or felt, it was all gone now, stripped away with its flesh. Reduced to bone. The knot in his belly tightened at the thought. For the umpteenth time, Jamie wondered why he’d come here, what had drawn him back to this place. Everyone in his life was gone and, in a moment of desperate loneliness, he’d thought of this hut. Of Maggie.

The front door swung open just as Jamie reached out to knock. She stood on the threshold with the shadow of the doorway hanging over her. The thin skin of her face pulled into an ear-to-ear smile. She wore a complex jumble of coats and sweaters, all of different colors and styles, but all weathered and full of holes. A similar casserole of skirts hung over a tattered pair of wool pants. The layered bulk hid her frame, but based on her narrow neck and bony wrists, Jamie could only assume she was stick-thin. When she grinned, the ligaments in her neck pulled taut like elastic cords, and the wrinkles that covered her face deepened. A knotted nest of white hair stuck out in every direction. Jamie let his hand drop.

“Hello,” Maggie said. “How can I help you?”

“Sorry,” Jamie stammered, “I’m—I mean, I was wondering if maybe you could—my name is—”

“Jamie! Yes, I remember you. Such a sweet boy. I was so sorry to hear about your mother.”

“Oh,” Jamie hesitated. “She mentioned you,” he said, after a moment. “Told me I should come see you.”

“I thought she might.” Maggie turned and hobbled into the hut. “Come on in, Jamie. Make yourself at home.”

Maggie took a kettle from the small wood stove in the corner of the sparsely furnished hut and poured a steaming cup of tea. She handed it to Jamie and returned the kettle to the stove without pouring a cup for herself.

He mumbled his thanks and twisted the cup on the saucer, preferring to watch the liquid quiver instead of meeting Maggie’s eyes.

“What can I do for you, today?”

Jamie forced himself to look up. Her eyes were wide and dark and crow’s feet furrowed the corners.

Jamie remembered coming here with his mother when he was a small boy, sitting on the same stool with a piece of lemon-flavored candy tucked into his cheek. At the time, he’d liked Maggie, because she had given him candy.

His mother had asked him to wait outside while the ritual began.

She’d visited Maggie often, sometimes as much as twice a month. Jamie only came with her once, when she couldn’t get a sitter, and he was too young to stay home alone.

“I helped her reconnect with your father.”

“I guess she wanted me to speak to you about him,” Jamie said.

“Possibly,” Maggie said. Her smile finally faded as she rubbed her knobby chin, seemingly deep in thought. “Or, perhaps she wanted me to sing with you.”

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They made small talk until dusk. Maggie asked about his life, and Jamie told her about his college experience and his new, lackluster job. She shared nuggets of information about his mother and father, always with a twinkle in her eye. His father always took his coffee black, and his mother used to write poetry, during her own college days, Maggie said. He tried to ask her about her own life, but her answers were vague. When he asked how long she’d lived on the edge of town, she only said “a long time,” and pushed the conversation back to him. He told her about his mother’s passing, and the toll her illness had taken on her. He didn’t ask whether Maggie and his mother had seen each other after her diagnosis, before she was hospitalized.

As the light began to fade, Maggie placed a number of lopsided candles around the hut, lighting them one by one. The shadows cast by the candlelight stretched as the hut grew dark. The room seemed smaller with shadows shaking on the walls.

Jamie couldn’t help shifting in his seat. His teacup sat on the table, drained and forgotten. His leg bounced without meaning to.

Maggie returned to her seat and folded her hands in her lap. “We will begin, now,” she said. Her eyes closed. She cleared her throat and started to sing.

At first, Jamie hardly heard the sound. It started as a dull ringing in his ears. He struggled to believe that it came from Maggie, who sat stiff as a board, half-hidden under her mountain of coats and sweaters, with her eyes firmly shut. The volume rose gradually until a hum filled the air.

It was the same sound he’d heard as a boy. The notes flowed together, and the louder the song grew, the deeper the pitch became until the hut seemed to quiver and Jamie’s head rang like a gong. His body went numb, and the dark room spun around him, the guttering candles burning spots in his vision as he tried to look away from Maggie, to find anything else to focus on. When Jamie looked at her neck, he saw that the sound really did come from her. Her throat rose and fell as each note gave way to the next.

The unmistakable smell of the sea invaded the hut with the sting of salt and the stink of rotting fish. A cool breeze carried the smell, brushing his cheeks and stirring his hair. It seemed to radiate from the splintering whale ribs and circle him. Jamie suddenly felt drowsy, though he fought the urge to sleep. As he hovered between waking and dreaming, he recognized the song. It was whale song, and, in that moment, he couldn’t help but appreciate the haunting beauty of it. Such a lonely song.

It echoed in Jamie’s head long after Maggie stopped. Her eyes fluttered open, and her mouth twisted back into a smile. Jamie struggled to see her through half-lidded eyes. His vision wouldn’t focus. Through the fog, Jamie thought Maggie’s wrinkles had deepened and her face had drooped, but he couldn’t be bothered to care. He felt fully at peace, content to sit and return Maggie’s smile.

“It’s time to go to the shore,” Maggie said. Even though she spoke in her ordinary voice, Jamie could hear the song hiding in her speech. “Are you ready to go, Jamie?”

She stood, rising above him like a shadow, and whispered for him to join her. When he failed to move, her bony hand wrapped around his wrist, and she guided him to his feet.

“Please, Jamie,” she said, “lead the way. Just down to the water’s edge.”

He barely felt the door as he pressed past it. His skin tingled, and his steps came slowly. The air felt like water, resisting his every move. The lights of the night sky seemed unnaturally bright. The moon blazed like a spotlight, and glancing at the stars left splotches in his vision. Feeling returned to him step by step, replaced by growing hypersensitivity to the world around him. Jamie felt the wind splitting against his body, the resultant streams of air curling around him. The stink of rotting fish still dominated, but now Jamie thought he smelled the space where the tide met the sand, and the dew on the grass. A chorus of crickets replaced Maggie’s song in his head.

As they neared the shore, a horrible, slimy feeling overcame him. Maggie shuffled along behind him, breathing deep, ragged breaths. She loomed in his periphery, a misshapen mass that lumbered after him. He glanced over his shoulder, trying to get a better look at her.

“Focus on the water, dearie,” she whispered.

Jamie’s head snapped back to face the sea. He assured himself that the strange shape in the corner of his eye was just little old Maggie, looking a bit stranger than normal as the moonlight exaggerated the many lumpy layers she wore.

They stopped where the beach met the sea. Moonlight glittered on the black water. Sea foam rolled over his shoes as small waves broke on the shore, soaking his socks. Jamie tensed from head to toe.

“Go in, Jamie.”

Jamie took a tentative step. The waves hit his ankle now, plastering the cuffs of his pants to his skin. The hairs on his neck stood up as the frigid water made contact, but he kept walking. The water climbed his legs as he ventured farther, numbing him inch by inch. Ripples shimmered around him as he pushed against the incoming tide.

“Almost there, almost there,” Maggie hummed, following close behind.

The water reached his hips. Jamie’s teeth chattered. He lost feeling in his fingertips as they skimmed the surface of the icy water.

With the water creeping up his chest and reaching for his shoulders, Jamie risked another glance back at Maggie. Though she waded through the water only a few feet behind him, her silhouette became even harder to discern against the dark background of the water. When the light hit her just right, Jamie thought he got a glimpse of gray skin hanging from her face in heavy jowls, as if her skin was slipping off.

“Don’t look back, Jamie,” she said. “Focus on the water.”

When the water encircled his neck and the ripples in the water brushed his chin, Maggie finally told Jamie to stop. She moved to stand directly beside him, but he dared not look. Whatever she had become—if she had changed at all—he didn’t want to see it. He sucked in deep breaths, an unconscious response to the water’s chill. His heart beat frantically.

“Look, look!” Maggie hissed, her voice distant and distorted. The sleeve of her outermost coat brushed Jamie’s shoulder as she reached past him. A long, spindly finger pointed to the surface of the water, now settled and still like glass. “They’re coming.”

Jamie tried to ask what she meant, but she shushed him before he could say a word. Her breath hit his neck in a thin, surprisingly cold, stream.

Two white shapes tumbled in with the next wave. As they came closer, they unfurled like deep sea anemones, revealing long, pale tendrils that trailed in the water. No, not tendrils. Arms. Legs. The shapes slowed in front of him and turned their pale, bloated faces to the sky. They glowed in the moonlight, hovering centimeters below the water’s surface. Bulging, glassy eyes stared up at the stars, and their blue lips stood out against chalky skin. Black veins showed through nearly translucent cheeks.

Corpses, Jamie realized with a start. They were corpses, risen from depths he couldn’t see. The slow dread that had been creeping through him exploded into outright horror. He wanted to turn and run, to push past Maggie and scream all the way to his car.

Then he recognized the corpses, and his heart seemed to stop. “I don’t understand,” he said, unable to tear his eyes away from them.

“Aren’t you happy to see them?” Maggie asked. Her hand came to rest on his shoulder. Jamie dimly recognized that her fingers were far too long and far too thin, brushing the crook of his arm with knobby fingertips. “They came all this way to see you, Jamie. Isn’t that special?”

The body on the right was a woman. A full head of hair spread out around her like a silk curtain. The bloating in her face created a shadowy pit around her eyes, but her cheekbones hid behind her skin instead of jutting out of a gaunt face. The longer he looked, the more familiar she became. It was his mother.

The man on the left had a buzz cut, a square jaw, and a stern expression on his dead face. Wrinkles creased his brow. Jamie studied the corpse, and found himself thinking of a stranger’s photo in a tarnished frame, sitting on his mother’s nightstand. How often had he ducked into her bedroom to study the man in that picture? It was his father.

Both wore plain white clothes that rippled in the current.

“What is this?” Jamie demanded, though he couldn’t bring himself to raise his voice over a whisper.

“Didn’t you want to see them?”

“What? I don’t—I don’t—”

“Your mother wanted you to come,” Maggie reminded him. Her singsong voice gurgled, as if fighting through a slimy film in her throat. “She wanted to see her baby. Needed to know you were alright.”

As if on cue, a wave rocked the bodies, and their heads turned away from the stars to face Jamie. He tried to convince himself that the smile on his mother’s face was a trick of the light.

“These are not my parents,” Jamie said, talking more to himself than to Maggie.

“Of course, they are,” Maggie said. “How could you forget the faces of your own parents, sweetie?”

“My father drowned twenty years ago,” Jamie insisted. His body was never found, he added silently. No doubt the ocean had torn it apart with time. For years, Jamie had grimaced at the thought that fish must have picked his father apart, that he was just another meal in their daily existence. “My mother died in a hospital bed. And she looked nothing like this!”

Anger bubbled up in Jamie’s gut. He couldn’t stand to look at these things, these facsimiles wearing familiar faces. He hated how they stared at him, so unfocused yet so intent.

“These are your parents.” Maggie spoke casually, as if she had done this many times before. “The sea claimed them.”

“My mother did not drown!”

“No,” Maggie said, “but the sea was in her veins, pumping through her heart, the same as you and me. The sea lives in us, and it claims us all, when we go. If you know the way, the sea can bring your loved ones back to you with the rising tide.”

Jamie just shook his head and studied the face of his mother. He had almost replaced it with her final face, the face ravaged by chemo and pain and debt, little more than skin stretched over bone, a shell of her former self. Now, she wore the same smile she had worn each day when she picked him up from school as a boy.

“Why do you think your mother came here again and again?” Maggie asked. “She was a grieving single mother, never given the time to process the death of her young husband. How could she? She had to be strong for you, now that she was standing all on her own.

“She heard that I could reunite her with her beloved, and I did, each time she visited me here. We would wade into the water, just as you have tonight, and wait for your father to come, as fresh and young as the day the sea claimed him. Sometimes she would speak to him and tell him about you. Sometimes she just stared.”

Jamie’s eyes darted between the two corpses.

“I offered to let her go with him,” Maggie sang, “but she never had the heart. She didn’t want to leave you. She was a good mother. I admired her a great deal.”

Jamie drank her words in. His frantic heart slowed. He gulped air, catching drops of salt water on his tongue. He couldn’t take his eyes off the bodies. His mother’s arm drifted towards him, her splayed fingers reminding him once more of a sea anemone’s tendrils waving in the ocean current. Was she reaching for him? Or were the waves moving her limp body like a drunken puppeteer?

“Was there something in the tea?” Jamie asked.

Maggie chuckled. “Just tea.”

Another wave rolled in, splashing Jamie across the mouth. His mother’s body twisted in the wave’s wake. Her hand inched closer to Jamie’s arm, but her gaze remained fixed on his face.

“See?” Maggie asked. “She misses you.”

“If I go with her,” Jamie mumbled, “I’ll die.”

“Yes. In a way. But you’ll be with her,” Maggie said.

“A corpse in the water?”

“No, no, no,” Maggie whispered. “You won’t understand until you give it a try.”

“I don’t know if I want that. I don’t think I do.”

“That’s alright, Jamie,” Maggie said, “but you’ll go with them eventually. What’s keeping you, now? What part of your current life is holding you back?”

Jamie had no answer. Everybody he’d ever cared about was gone. His friends had moved away to lead more fulfilling lives than his. Now that his mother was gone, his entire family was dead, and everything he’d ever seen or thought or felt was gone with them. He was stripped of flesh, reduced to bone. No different from the whale that held Maggie’s hut together. He lived alone, and each month’s rent was a struggle. It seemed like every day he was learning of a new way the world was coming to an end.

He missed his mom. He wanted to know his dad.

“What do I do?”

Maggie leaned even closer until Jamie thought he could feel her skin on his. Her cheek was slick and slimy. “Just let them take you,” she said. “But make sure—really, truly sure—that you are ready to go.”

“What happens if I’m not?”

“The sea will claim you.”

Jamie couldn’t help but imagine his lungs straining as they filled with seawater, or his body crumpling in the dark depths of the ocean, unable to withstand the weight of all that water bearing down on him. He swallowed. It felt odd for his mouth to be so dry despite standing shoulder-deep in the ocean. His fingers twitched underwater, though he hardly felt them. He extended his hand, watching it travel like a part of somebody else’s body. Its shape warped under the rippling water.

His fingers brushed his mother’s hand, and she latched on. No emotion flickered across her dead face as she lunged. Her grip was like iron clasped around his wrist. It hurt, and Jamie cried out.

Maggie remained silent as Jamie’s mother began to sink. Darkness enveloped her face as she retreated from the moonlight. Then his father grabbed hold, seizing Jamie’s other arm and pulling him face-first into the surf.

Fear took over as he plunged into the cold. He couldn’t see, save for hints and glimpses of his parents’ porcelain skin, flitting in and out of the dark like phantoms. His wrists screamed in pain. They would break, he was sure of it. Already, his lungs were straining. Would they burst? Would his heart?

Jamie understood, then, that he didn’t want to die. He became a frenzied animal backed into a corner, fighting with a strength he didn’t know he had. He didn’t want to drown, and he didn’t want to go wherever they would take him. Life had never seemed so worthwhile as it did now, with his lungs burning and his head spinning.

He resisted, planting his heels in the sand and pulling back. He strained against their grips like a fish straining against a hook. Despite their seemingly frail and limp bodies, they didn’t budge, and he struggled to keep them from sinking any further. Maybe they were unimaginably heavy, or maybe the ocean itself was pulling them down and away, eager to reclaim them.

In a final act of desperation, with his lungs about to give, Jamie opened his mouth and screamed. Bubbles exploded past his lips, rushing to the surface and casting a low, warbling sound through the water.

Their grip loosened for a moment, and Jamie pulled himself up just as he began to grow dizzy. He screamed as his head broke into open air.

“I don’t—I don’t,” Jamie spluttered, “I don’t want to go! I don’t want to go!” Pain exploded in his wrists as they grabbed him once more, fingers tightening like an iron vise. “Maggie!” he screamed. “I changed my mind! Maggie, please! I’m not ready!”

They pulled him back in. Water rushed up his nose and into his mouth. The salt stung in his nostrils. Jamie shook his head, threw his shoulders back, and thrashed with all his might. His lungs were empty. His thoughts jumbled together.

Finally, their pale hands slithered away, into the dark. Jamie’s feet slipped and slid on the sand as he scrambled to push himself above water. He clawed his way up, arms splashing wildly on the surface as he sucked in air.

When he whirled around, Jamie saw Maggie standing there. At least, whatever it was must have been Maggie, because it wore her pile of coats and her many skirts. It even had her tangled mess of white hair.

But in other ways, the thing he saw was not Maggie. It was tall and hunched, with long, spindly arms and fingers. Its gray face drooped and shone with mucus. Big, black eyes, glinted in the moonlight like polished glass, regarded him without any discernible emotion. Its lips transitioned into a short, flabby beak, and pink gills flexed on its long, serpentine neck. It cocked its head at Jamie.

Jamie tried to scream, but he only managed a strangled squeak.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” the thing cooed. “It’s a hard decision to make. Your mother never could.”

Jamie eyed it warily, too stunned to move. His heart hammered against his rib cage. He stretched his arms out to steady himself as he regained his balance. He had had enough. He couldn’t take any more.

“You don’t have to go tonight,” the thing said. “There will be other chances.” Its rubbery beak quivered as it spoke.

Jamie sidestepped, nearly tripping over himself before running as fast as his legs would carry him. The water slowed him, but he splashed past the thing. When he reached the beach, Jamie stumbled on the slick sand but kept moving. His legs propelled him farther and faster than they ever had before.

“Come back to me when you’re ready to join them,” the thing said, its voice calm. The words echoed into the night as Jamie raced past the whale bone hut and over the nearest hill, panting, groaning, and sobbing.

By the time Jamie reached his car, the world seemed eerily silent. He no longer heard the lapping of the waves or the whispering of the wind. Maggie didn’t sing. She’d stopped calling after him. The low grumble of his engine came as a sweet relief, as did the sound of gravel crunching under his tires as he sped away. But even those sounds seemed to blend together and fade.

When the silence became too much, he forced himself to hum. The meager sound comforted him. Jamie began to sing, low and steady, and the trembling in his arms subsided. The song carried him home, soothing him as he returned to town, and then to his tiny apartment.

It wasn’t until he stepped inside that Jamie realized he’d been singing Maggie’s song. The whale song didn’t sound right, coming from his human lips, but he had been imitating the same notes seamlessly running together, rising and falling in pitch.

The realization made him shiver. It made the shadows in his apartment feel as black as the ocean, as if his parents might drift out at any moment.

Jamie ran to his bedroom and turned on every light. He climbed into bed and huddled under the blankets. He’d begun shaking again, and his wrists began to ache, as if his parents were grabbing him once more. Desperate, he continued singing. The more he sang, the more his heart slowed.

The song lulled him to sleep, and it was with him when he woke the next morning. By then, the pain in his wrists felt like a distant dream. He thought of his parents throughout the day, and the days that came after. He began to wonder if he’d made a mistake, remembering the way his mother had seemed to smile at him.

More than anything, he thought of Maggie, and he sang her song. It was a good song. Soothing. Peaceful. Jamie thought he might like to hear it again, someday.

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Host Commentary

PseudoPod, Episode 909 for March 1th, 2024.

The Witch in the Whale Bone Hut, by Brian Kelsey

Narrated by Dennis Robinson; hosted by Scott Campbell audio by Chelsea Davis

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Hey everyone, hope you’re all doing okay. I’m Scott, Assistant Editor at PseudoPod], your host for this week, and I’m excited to tell you that for this week we have The Witch in the Whale Bone Hut], by Brian Kelsey. This story is a PseudoPod original.

Author bio:
B.C. Kelsey is a graduate from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he studied English and Creative Writing, for all the good it did him. He currently lives with a grumpy, elderly cat, and a less grumpy, less elderly girlfriend.

Narrator bio:
Dennis Robinson hails from the haunted small town of Gettysburg, along with his floofy newfie Yoshi. When not narrating, Dennis is one of the crazy people behind the podcast Botched: A D&D Podcast. An improv comedy show draped in the loose skin of Dungeons and Dragons, with a bit of drinking involved. This season is D&D 5th Edition meets the SCP Foundation. For those of you who don’t know what the SCP is, think X-files on steroids, where the cases can range from hilarious to absolutely horrifying. They also have an employee orientation video to help acclimate you to that universe over on their youtube channel. Dennis is also the writer of the graphic novel series Lycan: Solomon’s Odyssey, the story of the world’s first werewolf. A mix of horror, mythology, adventure, and history. During the month of March he has his Kickstarter for the third book in his series. You can follow the Kickstarter or sign up by going to www.lycanbook.com. The third book is best described as HP Lovecraft meets Gilgamesh. And don’t worry, if you missed out on the first two books, you can get those in the Kickstarter along with a ton of other goodies!”

And now listen to the waves crashing against the beach, for they have a story for you and we promise you, it’s true.

***

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Well done, you’ve survived another story. What did you think of The Witch in the Whale Bone Hut by Brian Kelsey? If you’re a Patreon subscriber, we encourage you to pop over to our Discord channel and tell us.

You have to move on. Like most advice, this phrase is doubled edged. If you are still picking at the wound of losing a loved one, it’s a good reminder to let the wound heal. When your wound is deep and oh so painful, it sounds callous and cruel. Are they telling you to ignore that a significant part of your life is gone, that death is unfair, to forget that your loved one existed? How dare they. So when someone comes along and says you have that person back, you listen, And that’s when the horror begins.

You could be subjected to the everyday horror of being scammed by so-called mediums and physics. Since this is PseudoPod, you can be confronted by horrors that are not everyday. There are hordes of vampires, zombies, and ghosts that show you that coming back from the grave is not a good thing. There are so many stories of people crossing so many lines to have their loved ones come back, but they come back wrong. Why would anyone do that?

The answer to that question is why this story is so good. It conveys how powerful that pain is. How it can wear you down to the point where your common sense and rationality are worn away to the point where you will do anything, anything, to make it stop. For just a few minutes more. Just so you won’t be alone. What’s worse, even after Jamie survives his encounter with the dead in the deep, he can’t rule out going back. He reflects our own ambiguity. Be honest, could you say definitely that you wouldn’t cross a few lines?

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And on the subject of subscribing and support, PseudoPod is funded by you, our listeners, and we’re now formally a non-profit. One-time donations are gratefully received and much appreciated, but what really makes a difference is subscribing. A $5 monthly donation on Patreon will go farther than you would believe. Subscribers give us way more than just money, they give us stability, reliability, and dependability. Monthly donations give PseudoPod a well-maintained tower from which to operate, and trust us, you don’t want breaches in our walls.

If you can, please go to pseudopod.org and sign up by clicking on “feed the pod”. If you have any questions about how to support EA and ways to give, please reach out to us at donations@escapeartists.net.

If you can’t afford to support us financially, and we understand, times are insane– then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or generally talking about them on whichever form of social media seems the least awful this week. By the way, we now have a Bluesky account: find us at @pseudopod.org. And if you like merch, Escape Artists also has a Voidmerch store with a huge range of fabulous hoodies, t-shirts and other goodies. The link is in various places, including our pinned tweet. Check it out!

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PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

And finally, PseudoPod knows…. somethings dead is better

You know I had to do it.

See you soon, folks, take care, stay safe.