The Sound of Silence

October 31, 2023·26 min·2 clips

The investigator finds crewman Smit convulsing, his intestines strewn toward the foggy sea.

The episode opens with a quiet, threatening voice addressing a man named Jeremy in his home at night, noting it has been nearly a full moon since the last visit. The narrator promises not to wake Jeremy's son sleeping down the hall and begins reading from what it claims is a grandfather's journal. The journal entry is dated October 31st, 1841, and is written by a person who has cultivated a reputation as a man in order to gain access to dangerous maritime investigations. The writer is hired by Captain John of the ship Sound of Silence to investigate a route where an abnormally high number of ships have wrecked without any clear explanation from weather, reefs, or documented hazards. The narrator's sole shipmate in the bunk is Christopher, an insufferable drunk whose constant babble the narrator muffles with cloth ear rags. An Irish crewman named Patrick entertains the crew with Samhain stories about devils roaming the seas on All Hallows' Eve, but the captain cuts the stories short, not wanting the crew distracted by nightmarish thoughts near such a dangerous stretch of water. As night deepens, the narrator and Patrick share a quiet exchange at the railing, with Patrick speaking respectfully of the captain's heavy burden from losing crew members. A dense fog rolls in unexpectedly, alarming Patrick, who had just declared there was no fog in the air. The narrator spots two figures at the bow, then watches one flee as the other collapses — the young crewman Smit has been eviscerated, his intestines trailing over the railing into the sea. Below deck, two more crewmen have been reduced to a paste coating walls, floors, and ceiling. The narrator retrieves a revolver loaded with six special bullets — silver, iron, salt-and-priest-blood, and three engraved rounds — and heads to confront the captain. Bursting into the captain's quarters, the narrator finds roughly a dozen gutted crewmen arranged in a circle on the floor. Captain John stands in the center with a hairless, scale-skinned, milky-eyed creature beside him; more of the same creatures line the walls, and another enters through a rear window. When the creature opens its mouth, everyone in the room freezes. Christopher, having followed the narrator, is killed from behind — his organs extracted through his back. The narrator fires and wounds one creature with an iron bullet. Captain John pleads that they had a deal and that last time was supposed to be the last, but the creature pierces his jaw with its twin claws and lifts him until his skull splits. With the room on fire from a dropped lamp, the last creature paralyzes the narrator and slowly disembowels them, leaving them to drown in their own blood. Back in the framing device, the narrator wraps up the story with sardonic remarks about sweet dreams, muses that the journal writer's suffering may have led to iron ship construction, and says goodbye to Jeremy before heading home to feed people waiting there.

As heard by us

A fogbound sea story where dread starts quietly and then turns bloody.

The review lands best when it stays close to the shipboard unease, where a grandfather's journal, fog, and a talkative bunkmate set up a slow, tightening dread. The uneasy captain helps keep that pressure in place, and the sudden burst of blood gives the story its hard turn.

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Why you'd press play

Play it for a fog-choked ship journal that tilts into blood-soaked horror.

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