"The Mylingar" by Nicole Duffeck

The Mylingar

by Nicole Duffeck

 

We were anchored twelve miles off the coast of Iceland, suspended in the black stillness of the North Atlantic. The previous night, the aurora had swept across the sky like a divine omen - all ghostly greens and bleeding purples. It felt more like a warning than a welcome.

Our expedition was here to study the Greenland shark, a creature that lived so long and moved so slowly it seemed half-dead already. Most of us were marine biologists, researchers, and grad students. Tourists with PhDs. But we had Ulf, an Icelandic captain with a face carved out of old wood and eyes like fogged glass. Ulf didn’t smile. He didn’t have to. He kept us alive.

We’d called him our nautical sherpa, joking at first. But after just one day in Arctic waters, the jokes faded. Ulf never joined our laughter anyway. He was a man who spoke only when the sea let him.

On our first night, as we gathered around the galley table sipping cheap whiskey and burning with cold, Ulf told us about Norse navigators, men who could read the sea like scripture. We expected more stories of that kind the second night.

Instead, Ulf told us about the Mylingar.

“Murdered children.”  He paused to take a sip of his drink before continuing. “Unbaptized infants. Babies unwanted, buried in secret places. They don't rest. They wander. You’ll hear them first, crying, singing lullabies they never got to sleep to. If you find one, it will climb on your back and ask to be carried to consecrated ground. But the closer you get, the heavier the Mylingar becomes, until your bones snap, or your heart fails. If you drop it, it kills you.”

We stared at him, half amused, half uncomfortable. The look on his weathered face brooked no laughter: he wasn’t joking.

Then he looked out the porthole, his eyes reflecting a pale slice of moon. “Don’t look outside after dark.” 

That night, sometime after midnight, I heard it: A baby’s cry. It started faintly, just a thin wail drifting over the deck, carried on the cold wind. Too real and too human to be imagined. 

Tricia rose from her bunk, frowning. She reached for the curtain near the porthole, but Ulf’s voice came like a gunshot.

“Don’t look.”

She froze. Ulf didn’t raise his voice again; he didn’t have to.

In the morning, we found small, child-sized muddy footprints on the deck. They were so tiny, wet and smeared, tracking from the bow to the center of the ship. We hadn’t docked since acquiring Ulf and no one had left the vessel. 

Tricia was livid. “This isn’t funny,” she snapped. “Whoever did this, it’s not a joke.”

No one confessed. No one even looked at her.

Later, someone whispered, “What’s her problem?”

Another voice answered quietly: “She gave her kid up, a daughter, I think. This was years ago.”

No one said anything after that.

That day, the ocean gave us nothing. No sharks. No movement. Just silence beneath endless grey.

The night was different, though. After darkness had fallen, the baby returned.

The cries were softer this time, more distant, but somehow more desperate. Then came a new sound: a steady thump... thump... thump. Slow, deliberate. Perfectly timed with the gentle rocking of the boat. It was coming from the starboard side.

I stood, the hair on my arms lifting as if the cold had crept inside my skin. I moved toward the stairs, toward the deck, drawn by a terrible compulsion.

Ulf was already there, standing like a statue at the top of the steps.

“Don’t look outside after dark,” he said.

I sat up with him until dawn, the thumping continuing throughout the night. Rhythmic and gentle, it would have been soothing if it weren’t so wrong.

The cries came and went; sometimes close, sometimes far, but always just out of reach.

We drank coffee in silence, neither Ulf nor I saying another word.

When the weak sun finally broke over the horizon, Ulf stood. Wordlessly, I followed him onto the deck.

She was caught in the net on the starboard side. Tricia. Her body rocked with the motion of the sea, lips blue, hair spread out like seaweed. One hand was tangled in the netting, the other limp. Her shoulder bumped the hull with the same slow rhythm we’d heard all night. Thump. Thump. Thump.

Neither of us spoke, we just stood, staring at Tricia for a moment before Ulf began to quietly pull in the net.

We didn’t find any more muddy footprints and the crying never returned, but some nights, far from shore, I still hear it. A soft sound carried by the wind, somewhere between a cry and a song. And when I do, I remember Ulf’s voice.

Don’t look outside after dark.