I always wanted to come here. But not like this.
The sea raged behind me like it wanted to drag me back. Cold wind slapped my face, the kind that slices straight through your soaked clothes and into your bones. Thunder cracked across the sky, throwing white veins through the dark like a warning.
But I couldn't turn back, no matter how scared I was.
I stood at the edge of an island that didn't exist on any tourist map, adrift in the middle of nowhere, swallowed by endless sea and silence. There was no trace of life here, except for a solitary house crouched near the cliffs, half-buried in shadows and salt.
This was where my father had lived for ten years. What he once called paradise now loomed like a forgotten ruin, tilted, cracked, and claimed by time. A lighthouse without a flame. A ghost's last refuge.
This wasn't an adventure. It was a promise. A promise I made to my father.
I pushed against the door to the house. It didn't budge at first, but when I pushed harder, it creaked open, half breaking off the hinges, half hanging on for dear life. I stepped inside and sighed when I got reprieve from the assaulting storm outside. It was a small mercy, since the inside of the house wasn't any better than the outside. Damp and in shambles, but it was better than the rain and wind slapping my face like an angry neighbor. I dragged my bags over the warped threshold and slumped them down on the floor.
Inside smelled like sea salt, rot, and memories. I looked at the broken study table in the corner and realized it might be the place where Dad had spent hours writing his research papers.
There was barely anything left of his anymore, just a rusted metal bed frame, the broken bamboo table, and the shadows Dad left behind. The rain hammered the roof so hard it sounded like a war drum. I peeled off my wet jacket, my hands shaking from exhaustion.
Two months ago, my dad died. His body arrived in a wooden box, chemically preserved and sealed like a museum exhibit. No explanation. No goodbyes. Just a stack of old journals and whispers of insanity.
They said he was obsessed. Delusional. Unfit to be taken seriously.
But I knew better. He was a scientist. A brilliant one. And he'd spent his last years chasing something the rest of the world refused to believe existed.
The merpeople.
Everyone laughed at him. Mocked his research. Said he'd gone too far. Even my mother, especially my mother, never missed a chance to call him insane. She said he abandoned us, but I always knew the truth.
He wasn't running away. He was running toward something.
Now I was here, in the house he had built and spent the past eight years of his life in, the storm hammering on the walls, my heart pounding with something I couldn't name. Fear? Hope? Grief?
Maybe all three.
I found the basement by accident.
I was looking for charcoal to light the old oven when I spotted a trapdoor half-covered by a dusty rug. It creaked open like it was afraid to reveal its secrets.
The basement smelled damp and old. My flashlight flickered across bags of charcoal, and something else.
Something big. Covered in black plastic.
I didn't know why, but my pulse spiked. My feet moved before my brain told them to. I reached out and yanked the sheet off in one go.
A massive glass tank stared back at me, nearly scraping the ceiling. Thick glass walls. A ladder. A sealed top. A pulley system.
My mouth went dry. It looked like an aquarium, but one so big it took up most of the basement. However, this place couldn't be called a basement, an underground research facility was more like it. It was bigger than the outer structure of the house. Notebooks, a medical exam table, and other medical equipment lay there, a thick layer of dust sitting on them.
Back upstairs, I managed to light a fire and brew tea with trembling hands. The storm hadn't eased. I curled up on the bamboo platform, my cup nestled between numb fingers, the glow of a single oil lamp casting dancing shadows on the wall.
Dad had once sat here, I realized. Writing those journals. Sketching what he believed to be real. Alone. Ridiculed. Determined.
That night, I slept to the sound of the ocean roaring and the memory of his voice whispering stories of things no one believed.