Sea Sick: A Horror Novel

Have my actions damned me to hell? Am I evil?

Jack had never thought of his actions that night as murder – more as justice that would not be rendered in any other way – but perhaps some celestial judge saw it differently. If there was a God, maybe He saw murder as a sin regardless of its motives. Jack could admit that he was a killer, but there was no way he would ever admit to being an evil man. In the grand scheme of things he was firmly planted on the side of good. Especially when compared to the countless wicked souls he had spent his entire life apprehending. He’d spent a majority of his existence trying to help others, trying to make the world a safer place. If this was his reward – damnation – then God could go straight to Hell.

If He thinks I could have done any better, I suggest He tries living on this rotten earth for a while. Then perhaps He’d understand what the few decent souls left in the world are up against.

Jack had never been one for contemplation or philosophical thinking, but he had found himself turning to it more and more lately, if only as a way of keeping sane. He would ask himself questions to try and occupy his mind and then obsess desperately over the answers. It was one of the few good ways to pass time. Jack knew, though, it would only be a matter of days now before his mind started to unravel from the strain of it all. The loneliness and isolation of his resetting world would eventually drive him mad. Eventually he would run out of questions to ask himself.

“Jack?”

The sound of his name shocked him. He glanced up to find someone standing at the edge of the pool looking down at him. The sun, shining behind, presented the figure as a silhouette, but Jack could still tell who it was. It was the brunette waitress.

Jack’s mouth dropped and he tried to swallow. Then he tried to speak, but failed.

The waitress smiled at him but she seemed weak and weary. She was not wearing the uniform she’d had on when Jack had originally met her. “I think you’ve been looking for me,” she said to him. “Come with me, Jack. I think I know what’s happening.”

***

Tally’s cabin was at the aft of A Deck, which she told him meant at the back. When Jack had previously searched for her, he’d knocked on just about every cabin door on the ship. Most did not open and there was no way to tell if anyone was inside simply ignoring him or if the rooms were empty. He’d eventually given up on finding Tally, and it seemed that as soon as he did, she found him.

Her room was nice, personal, with a wide assortment of chintzy knickknacks adding to its charm. Jack took a seat on the foot of the neatly-made bed and Tally sat down on a chair beside the room’s cluttered dressing table.

“So, what do you know?”Jack asked before she even had time to settle in her seat.

“The day is resetting.”

Jack sighed. “I know that! The day keeps repeating over and over.”

Tally shook her head. “No, you do not understand. It is not repeating. It is resetting.”

“What’s the difference?”

“For the day to be repeating it must first exist, an unchangeable part of our timeline. That is not what is happening. For whatever reason, this day is being wiped clean at midnight and reset to start over.”

“But the same things happen every day. Repeating.”


Tally looked at Jack as though he was a child. “No. The things that happen on this day are fated to occur. They happen because they are a culmination of the almost infinite events from the days preceding them. What people do tomorrow is a product of what they do today. The world ripples and those ripples do not change.”