Ah, hello, gentle listener, and welcome to nocturnal transmissions, short stories and mutterings from the wrong side of midnight.

We do hope you enjoyed our tribute to Edgar Allan Poe last episode.

You may remember, we promised you a tale by Sarky this time around, but I'm afraid you'll

have to wait for that particular pleasure.

Our humble narrator has just finished a new tale and insists on sharing it with you

immediately. I'm afraid patience is not one of our virtues here at nocturnal transmissions. Neither is

virtue, for that matter. All aboard for Adam L.G. Nevels.

Hippocampus.

Walls of water, as slow as lava, black as coal, push the freighter up mountain sides, over frothing peaks, and into plunging descents. Across vast rolling waves, the vessel plows ungainly, conjuring galaxies of bubbles around its passage and in its wake. Temporary cosmoses

appear for moments in the immensity of onyx water, forged, then sucked beneath the hull, or a

sacrificed, fizzing to the freezing night air. On and on the great steel vessel wallops, staggering up as if from soiled knees before another nauseating drop into a trough.

There is no rest, and the ship has no choice but to brace itself, dizzy and near breathless, over and over again, for the next great wave. On board, lighted portholes and square windows

offer tiny yellow shapes of reassurance amidst the lightless roaring ocean that stretches all around

and so far below. Reminiscent of a warm home offering a welcome on a winter night, the cabin lights

are complemented by the two metal doorways that gape in the rear house of the superstructure.

There spilled light glosses portions of the slick deck. All of the surfaces on board are steel, painted white, riveted and welded

tight to the deck and each other. The metal cubes of the superstructure are necklaced by yellow

rails intended for those who must slip and reel about the flooded decks. Here and there,

white ladders rise, and seem by their very presence

to evoke a kang, kang, kang sound of feet going up and down quickly. Small lifeboat cases

resembling plastic barrels are fixed at the sides of the upper deck, all of them intact and locked shut.

The occasional crane peers out to sea with inappropriate nonchalance or with the expectation

...