The following entries were recovered from Miss Chalmers' medical journal in the possession of Prof. Avery Soames. The journal shows significant deterioration over the course of these weeks—the handwriting becomes less precise, words are sometimes scratched out or left incomplete, and there are gaps of several days where no entries appear at all. Most disturbingly, certain entries show evidence of having been written while the writer's hands were wet. The ink bleeds and spreads in ways that suggest seawater rather than fresh water, and there are passages where the writing becomes almost illegible, as though the writer's grip on the pen was failing. The final entries trail off into fragments, half-completed thoughts, and what appears to be another language entirely.
October 18, 1870
Temperature: 93.2°F
Pulse: Difficult to locate. Seems to be distributed rather than centralized. I can feel beating in my throat, my wrists, but also along my ribs where the marks are. As though my circulatory system is being... reorganized.
I have not eaten solid food in three days. The thought of it makes me nauseous. I can only tolerate water now. Glass after glass. I should be concerned about this—the human body requires nutrition beyond simple hydration—but the water satisfies something deeper than hunger. Something I did not know I possessed.
My skin. Dear God, my skin. It has taken on a quality I can only describe as waterlogged, but that description fails to capture the full wrongness of it. The texture is simultaneously supple and strange. When I pinch the flesh of my arm, it does not spring back as it should. It moves sluggishly, as though composed of something denser than normal human tissue. The mottling has spread from my ribs across my torso and down my thighs. In certain lights, I can see patterns beneath the skin. Networks of vessels that follow paths no human anatomy text has ever charted.
The marks along my ribs are no longer merely marks. When I examine them in my mirror—and I force myself to examine them daily, to maintain clinical distance—I can see the interior structures clearly. Cartilage arranged in delicate arches. Filaments that flex and expand. When I press on them, gently, I feel water flowing through channels that should not exist inside my body.
Last night I woke choking. Or I thought I was choking. But when my mind cleared, I realized I was breathing. The marks along my ribs were moving. Drawing air—or drawing something—through the new passages. For a moment, perhaps thirty seconds, I did not breathe through my nose and mouth at all. The marks sustained me.
I could breathe through my ribs.
Through gills.
I should be screaming. I should be finding some way to stop this. But I am so tired. Tired of fighting. Tired of documenting. Tired of clinging to the idea that I am still Beatrix Chalmers, still human, still mistress of my own fate.
Three parts of me, I wrote days ago. Horror and fascination and acceptance. But the proportions shift daily. Hourly. Sometimes moment to moment. Which part is the real me? Or am I simply fragmenting, shattering into pieces that no longer cohere into a unified self?
October 20, 1870
I lost two days. I do not know where they went.
I remember October 18th. Remember writing in this journal. Remember lying in my seawater-soaked bed, feeling the marks pulse with each breath. Remember Lady Soames coming to my room, though I pretended to sleep.
And then nothing until I woke this morning with seaweed tangled in my hair and sand beneath my fingernails. Not sand from a beach. Sand like you would find in deep water. Dark. Coarse. Flecked with tiny shells I cannot identify.
I have been somewhere. Done something. But the memory is not there. Or it is there but I cannot access it. As though a door in my mind has been locked from the inside and I am standing on the wrong side.
My temperature has dropped to 92.8°F. Still no hypothermia symptoms. My body appears to be adjusting, compensating, functioning normally at a temperature that should send me into shock. This suggests fundamental changes to my metabolism. To the way my cells process oxygen and regulate heat.
I am cold to my own touch. When I place my hand against my throat, I feel corpse-flesh. Yet I am alive. Walking. Thinking. Writing this.
What am I becoming?
October 22, 1870
The dreams. I must document my dreams before they consume me entirely.
Every night now, I dream of water. But these are not normal dreams. They have a vividness, a tactile reality, that exceeds waking life. I can feel the water surrounding me. Can feel it flowing through the channels along my ribs. Can feel it supporting my weight, removing gravity's tyranny, letting me move in three dimensions rather than two.
In last night's dream, I was swimming. Not at the surface, where swimmers paddle and gasp. But deep. So deep the light barely reaches. The water is not cold in these dreams—or rather, the cold is pleasurable. Like slipping into silk. Like being embraced by something vast and gentle.
I swim through underwater passages. Limestone tunnels carved by ancient currents. The walls are covered with patterns that might be writing. Symbols that seem to shift and reconfigure as I pass. Sometimes I see others swimming with me. Women with my condition. Their gill marks are fully developed, working beautifully, extracting oxygen from water with perfect efficiency.
They look at me with expressions I cannot quite read. Pity? Recognition? Welcome?
And then there are the... other things. Shapes that move in the deeper darkness. Things too large to be fish. Too purposeful in their movements to be animals. They watch me. I can feel their attention like pressure against my skin. Like a hand almost touching but maintaining distance. Like assessment.
One of them came closer in last night's dream. I could not see it clearly—the darkness was too complete, and its form seemed to... flicker. To exist in multiple configurations simultaneously. But I felt it touch me.
Felt it touch me everywhere.
It was not rape. I must be clear about that, even in my own private journal. It was not violent. But it was not consensual either. How can you consent when your body responds before your mind has processed what is happening? When flesh betrays you with desire you never chose?
I woke gasping. Wet. Not from seawater this time but from my own arousal. My hands were between my legs, and I was touching myself with a desperation that horrified me. The pleasure was so intense it approached pain. I could still feel the dream touch ghosting across my skin. Could still taste something in my mouth that was not water. Not exactly.
I wept as my body shuddered to its shameful conclusion. Wept with shame and horror and something else I will not name. The worst part: I wanted more. When consciousness fully returned and the dream faded, I wanted to sleep again. Wanted to return to that dark water. Wanted to feel that touch again.
Which part of me wants this? And does it matter anymore?
October 25, 1870
Professor Soames achieved brief lucidity today. Mrs. Crawford sent me to check on him because Lady Soames was away in the village—a rare occurrence. I found him sitting up in bed, his eyes focused and clear for the first time since I arrived.
He spoke to me. Not the underwater language. Not the wet guttural sounds. Actual English. Strained and painful, as though forcing his mouth to make shapes it no longer easily assumes, but comprehensible.
"Read... my... notes," he managed. Each word cost him visible effort. "Library. Hidden. Panel. East... wall."
I asked him what notes. What I would find.
"Everything." His eyes were desperate. "All... of us. Failed. All... failed."
He grabbed my wrist. His hand was cold as deep water. As cold as mine is becoming. And I saw the vein-writing surface on his skin. Saw it actually move, the patterns shifting and reconfiguring in real-time. Instructions, he'd once tried to tell me. Instructions for what?
"Cannot... stop it. But... you should... know. Should know what... becoming."
Then Lady Soames returned. I heard her footsteps in the hall, that peculiar cadence that is not quite a walk. The Professor's eyes widened. He released my wrist and fell back against his pillows, the lucidity draining from his face like water running out of a cracked vessel.
By the time Lady Soames entered the room, he was making those wet sounds again. She looked at me, and for a moment I saw something in her expression. Not quite satisfaction. Not quite pity. Something that existed between or beyond such simple emotions.
She asked if I spoke with him.
I told her he tried to warn me. Told me to find his notes and read them. That knowledge would provide no comfort.
I did not answer. What answer could I give?
She left then. Simply turned and walked away, humming that alien melody.
I have not yet looked for the notes. I will. But part of me already knows she's right. Part of me understands that learning the mechanism of my transformation will not help me prevent it. That I could understand every cellular process, every neural pathway being rewritten, every chemical change occurring in my blood—and still be helpless to stop it.
Knowledge without power is suffering. She told me that once. Perhaps the kindest thing would be to remain ignorant. To let the transformation happen without witnessing it. To surrender without understanding what I'm surrendering to.
But I am a nurse. A scientist. I cannot choose ignorance. Even if the knowledge destroys me, I must know. Must document. Must bear witness to my own obliteration.
October 28, 1870
I found the notes. They were exactly where Professor Soames said they would be. Behind a false panel in the library's east wall, concealed behind a set of medical texts that had not been disturbed in years.
Sixty-three journals. Spanning fifteen years. Detailing every aspect of Lady Soames' work. Every victim he witnessed. Every stage of transformation. Every failed attempt to stop it or reverse it or even slow it down.
I spent all night reading. Mrs. Crawford brought me tea around midnight, but I did not drink it. I could not stop. Could not tear myself away from the Professor’s increasingly desperate observations.
He was meticulous. Recorded temperatures and pulse rates and respiratory changes. Documented the progression of gill development. Tracked psychological deterioration. Interviewed victims in their lucid moments. Corresponded with medical colleagues in veiled terms, trying to find answers without revealing the full truth of what was happening.
He tried everything. Isolation from the house. Medical intervention. Even attempted exorcism, though he was not religious and documented his skepticism even as he tried it. Nothing worked. Nothing even slowed the process.
The most disturbing sections detail what happens after. After the victims walk into the water. After they fail to return. He hired men to watch the fens. To try to see what became of the women who disappeared.
What they saw... I cannot properly describe it. The accounts are fragmented, confused, often contradictory. But certain details repeat. Lights moving beneath the water. Shapes too large to be human. And sometimes, rarely, but sometimes—figures that looked almost human swimming in the deep channels. Women's faces, recognizable but changed. Eyes that had adapted to darkness. Skin that had taken on the color and texture of sea creatures. Bodies that moved with a grace impossible in normal human form.
They were alive. All of them. Not drowned. Not dead. But transformed so completely that "alive" became an inadequate description.
One of Soames' correspondents, an Italian physiologist, included a drawing based on descriptions from his own research into similar phenomena near Venice. The drawing shows a woman—recognizably a woman—but with elongated limbs, with structures along her ribs that are clearly gills, with hands that have begun to web between the fingers. And most disturbing: her face shows no distress. Her expression is one of contentment. Of satisfaction. Of having found something long sought.
Soames wrote in the margin: They choose it in the end. Every one. I have seen sixteen women walk into that water. Sixteen women I tried to save. And every single one went willingly. Begged to go. Fought anyone who tried to stop them.
And then, in a later entry: I begin to understand why. The conditioning is too thorough. Too deep. By the time transformation reaches a certain point, the victims cannot distinguish their own desires from implanted ones. They experience the surrender as liberation. The violation as consummation. The loss of humanity as homecoming.
This is the brilliance and the horror of what she does. She does not force them. She makes them want it. And by making them want it, she transforms violation into something that looks, from inside the victim's perspective, like choice.
His final entry, dated eight years ago:
I am marked now. I confronted her. Threatened to expose everything to the authorities. She merely smiled and asked what authorities I thought could comprehend, let alone prevent, arrangements older than Britain itself.
Then she took me to the water.
I remember going under. Remember the cold filling my lungs. Remember thinking: this is death. But it was not death. It was something worse. Something that has left me capable of thought but not of meaningful action. Capable of observation but not of intervention. Capable of warning but only in forms so fragmented as to be useless.
She has made me into a demonstration. A warning that warns too late. A voice that speaks too obscurely to be understood.
To anyone reading this: I tried. God knows I tried. I thought understanding the mechanism would provide power to stop it. But there is no power. There is only the slow, inexorable progression toward December 21st. Toward Solstice. Toward the water that calls and calls until even the strongest will cannot refuse.
Forgive me. I failed you all.
I sat in the library as dawn broke, surrounded by sixty-three journals documenting fifteen years of futile resistance. Of brilliant minds brought to bear on an unsolvable problem. Of love—for Pro. Soames did come to care for the women he could not save—rendered helpless before something ancient and vast.
She was right. The knowledge changes nothing. I know now exactly what is happening to me. Can cite the chemical changes in my blood. Can describe the restructuring of my pulmonary system. Can explain the neurological basis for the unwanted desire that grows stronger each day.
And it helps not at all.
November 1, 1870
Temperature: 91.9°F
Pulse: Cannot locate. Blood moves but not in normal patterns.
Respiratory rate: Variable. Sometimes I breathe through my nose and mouth. Sometimes through the marks along my ribs. Occasionally through both. My body is learning to extract oxygen from water-heavy air with the same efficiency it once extracted it from dry air.
I can no longer write clearly. My hands shake. Or perhaps the ink bleeds because my skin is constantly damp now. Moisture beads on my flesh the way it beads on cold glass. I am becoming a surface on which humidity condenses.
The fragmentation of self has progressed beyond three parts. I am now many parts. Many selves. Many voices were all speaking in my head simultaneously. The self that resists. The self that wants. The self that observes clinically. The self that has begun to think in underwater language. The self that remembers London and respectability and professional accomplishment. The self that recalls only water and darkness and a touch that unmade and remade me simultaneously.
Which self writes this? I cannot say. Perhaps all of them. Perhaps none. Perhaps the concept of unified self is itself a fiction I once believed in, and what I am experiencing now is simply the truth of multiplicity finally revealed.
November 4, 1870
lady soames came she always comes I pretend sleep but body knows her touch cold cold cold bone cold water cold deep cold and I respond. flesh responds while mind screams. she whispers
soon my dear soon you will understand soon you will see how beautiful
and I am so tired of fighting. so tired of pretending I do not want. because part of me does want oh god part of me wants it desperately wants to stop fighting stop thinking stop being
wants to swim wants to descend wants to breathe water wants to
- no. I will not. I am still. still
what am I still
November 7, 1870 (perhaps. Days blur)
Found myself at the library window staring at the fens. Cannot remember walking there. Cannot remember how long I stood. Time collapses. Expands. Means nothing.
I speak underwater language now. Catch myself humming that alien song. Lady Soames smiles when she hears it. "Your body remembers," she says. "Your cells know the truth your mind denies."
Ben tried to speak with me today in the garden. I saw his mouth move but could not understand the words. Or understood them but they seemed strange. Foreign. English has become the foreign language and something older, something wet and guttural and beautiful in its wrongness, has become native.
He looked at me with such pity. Put his hand on my shoulder. I felt the warmth of human touch, and it felt wrong. Too hot. Too dry. Too living.
Cold. I need cold. Need water. Need
November (which number? cannot recall)
the entity touched me in dreams again. not dream. not quite. something between dream and memory and vision of what will be.
vast. so vast. I cannot describe but I feel it. consciousness that operates on scales incomprehensible to single human mind. not evil. evil requires moral framework and requires choice. this is simply
is
it showed me the city beneath waves. showed me others like me. like what I will become. swimming in passages carved by currents older than continents. feeding on things that have no names. birthing young into darkness.
showed me my place in this. my purpose. my
and I wanted it. god help me I wanted to go there now. wanted to stop waiting. wanted to walk into water and not come back
woke weeping and wet and aching. aching everywhere. body knows what mind still tries to deny. body is ready. eager. waiting only for december 21. for solstice. for
forty-seven days she said when she came tonight. forty-seven days until you come home.
and I wept because I understood her. understood that water is home. that land is exile. that this body is prison and transformation is liberation and
no
no I must remember
must resist
must
November 12 (I think. I think it is the 12th.)
Vein-writing appeared on my arms this morning. Did not notice until Mrs. Crawford gasped when she brought water. She stared at my forearms where words surface and sink and surface again in patterns that shift with my pulse.
Instructions. Professor Soames said instructions. Instructions for what?
Cannot read them. They are not English. Not French. Not any human language. But I understand them anyway the way you understand hunger or thirst or need. Cellular understanding. The flesh reads what the mind cannot.
They say: Return
They say: Descend
They say: Become
Lady Soames saw them. Traced one with her finger and smiled. She told me that the water was writing to me. Offering an invitation.
I asked what it invites.
She told me I was inviting myself home.
November
cannot remember days. cannot remember. time is is
stood in garden tonight. midnight perhaps. moon on water in channels. so beautiful. wanted to walk to them. wanted to slip under. wanted to
Ben found me. ankle deep already. water so good so right so
he pulled me back. I screamed at him. Do not remember words. Do not remember language. Screamed in something older.
he wept. Not yet Not yet Miss Chalmers please not yet.
But body knows. Forty days perhaps less perhaps more. Counting becomes difficult. Time flows like water. Pools. Drains away.
What am I counting toward
What am I counting away from
Does it matter Does anything
[date unclear]
she showed me herself tonight. Showed me what she is beneath human seeming. Stood in my room and let the mask slip and I saw
saw gills working along her ribs. Saw skin that is not quite skin. Saw eyes that sometimes show vertical pupils. Saw beauty and wrongness combined.
This is what you will become she said. This is what you were always meant to become. Your body knows. Can you feel it knowing
and I could. Can. Body knows. Body eager. Body ready.
Mind still fights but losing. Losing language. Losing time. Losing self that was Beatrix Chalmers nurse from London. That self drowning in something larger. Something vaster. Something that was waiting all along in deep water.
She kissed my forehead. Her lips cold cold cold.
Soon she whispered. So soon now my dear. And you will be so beautiful. So free. So perfectly yourself.
And I understood her. Understood in language beyond words. Understood that she speaks truth. That transformation is not death is not violation is
is
cannot finish thought. Words fail. Language fails. Only water makes sense now. Only deep and dark and vast and
[no date]
temperature. must record. 90.1 F.
should be dead. Should be. But alive. So alive. Never felt more alive.
Skin mottled completely now. Beautiful patterns like light through water. Gills fully formed. Can breathe through them. Can breathe water.
Tried last night. Filled basin. Submerged face. Inhaled.
Water in my lungs and I did not drown. Did not panic. Felt natural. Felt right. Extracted oxygen same as air.
Breathed water for ten minutes. Could have stayed longer. Wanted to stay longer.
Body is ready.
When How long Must hold on must resist must
must what
What am I holding on to
What am I resisting
What remains of Beatrix that is worth saving
[fragment]
lady soames says thirty days. Thirty to solstice.
Thirty days until I walk into water.
Thirty days until I go home.
home
Home.
HOME.
The final pages of the journal show increasing deterioration. The handwriting becomes nearly illegible. Sentences trail off incomplete. Many passages are written in what appears to be underwater language—harsh consonants and sounds that seem designed for vocal cords submerged in water rather than air. The last several entries are brief fragments:
want
water calling
beautiful in the dark
touch me again
please
let me go
let me become
want to want to want to
The journal ends with a single word repeated down the final page, written in increasingly shaky script that suggests the writer could barely hold the pen:
home home home home home home home home home home
Below this, in Lady Soames' neat copperplate hand:
"December 21st. She walks at midnight. I will be there to welcome her. To show her what she has become. What she was always meant to become. Another bride for the deep water. Another vessel for purposes that transcend human understanding. Another priestess to serve what waits below.
She will be beautiful."
