A Letter from the Reef

The letter came to the house on Garrison Street in the second week of August 1927, with a Norwegian stamp and a postmark from a port that Clara Dunning could not find on any map at the Arkham library.

Her husband's ship, the Emma Crane, had been reported lost with all hands in April, somewhere in the South Pacific. There had been a service. There was a stone in the churchyard with nothing under it.

The letter was in Daniel's handwriting. It was dated May.

Clara, it began, I am told this will reach you, although I do not know by what post. I want you to know I am not hurt, and that I am not cold, and that I will explain as much as they allow.

He described the voyage first, and the details were right: the cook who burned everything, the mate's bad knee, the dog they took on at Valparaiso. Then he described a reef that was not on the charts, black and flat, rising out of calm water with no surf breaking on it. The captain had anchored in its lee to wait out a squall. In the night the reef had been closer.

It is not a reef, Daniel wrote. It is a roof.

The rest of the letter was harder to read, not because the hand grew worse but because it grew better: rounder, steadier, more careful than he had ever written in life. He described streets under the water and the angles of the buildings, which he said were wrong in a way that made his eyes ache for days. He described the others from the ship, who had all come down with him and who were all well. He described something enormous that slept at the center of the city, and the dreams it sent, and how after the first week the dreams stopped frightening him.

It will wake, he wrote near the end, not soon, but it will. When it does, the ones who came down here will go home first, to make ready. I asked if I could come to Arkham. They said yes.

Keep the porch light on, Clara.

She burned the letter that night in the kitchen stove. She did not tell anyone about it except her sister, years later.

But every evening for the rest of her life, at dusk, she went out onto the porch and turned off the light, and sat with it off until morning.