They call us liveaboards—ghosts who drift on water. We live in floating homes that rock to the rhythm of tides and secrets. It’s not an address but a temporary haunting.
To outsiders, our world glimmers with freedom and sunsets, but the truth hides below the waterline. Glamour is our mask. What lies beneath is darker, quieter, and watching you.
A marina isn’t a harbour; it’s a secrets vault. Every berth, every cabin light, conceals something unsaid. Codes protect what we’ve built here—codes that twist with the wind and dissolve with the rain. The uninitiated mistake our smiles for warmth. They don’t see the rules written in salt and silence.
Even those who work the docks, hauling ropes and polishing hulls, sense that something moves just beneath comprehension. They hear laughter echoing across still water at night and turn away before they can place the voice. The surface may shimmer, but no one living on land truly understands what floats in the black beneath.
We call it order, but it’s closer to fear.
A sailor’s nod can seal a pact or warn of danger.
Silence can bury a sin.
The ocean teaches its lessons harshly. It rewards loyalty and punishes hesitation. You either obey the code or you vanish. Sometimes both. That’s how balance is kept between life and death, between the wet and dry sides of existence.
Relationships bloom fast out here—desperate, brief, and transactional. The next storm can end them before sunrise. A kiss on the dock is as binding as a confession whispered to the tide. When a boat leaves, it’s as though the soul of another departs with it.
We guard our paradise from the fickleness of the land-dwellers. They arrive with suntan lotion and Bluetooth speakers, splashing about as though the sea were a novelty. They don’t know the rules. They don’t see the shadows that slip between the masts when the wind dies.
They never ask what happens when someone goes missing at sea. And we never say why.
Money isn’t our only currency. Out here, information buys silence, booze buys friendship, bodies buy favours. Boat parts change hands like relics. Secrets flow from one deck to another faster than tides. No receipts. No questions. No truth. No lies.
The marina manager knows better than to pry. He gets his protection for free—the liveaboards watch the piers for him after the lights go out. They report some things, but they are silent about most of them. It’s a bargain written in omission. The less said, the safer we all remain.
Two kinds of people float here. The first arrive on weekends with laughter and ice boxes, to play sailor for a day. They step aboard their fibreglass toys, drink and pretend to belong. They smile at us as if they’re sharing the life they wish they had. Then, as night falls, they leave—returning to their concrete boxes, unaware they trespassed on holy ground during their stay.
The second kind—us—stay. We linger through heatwaves and cyclones, storms and silence. We are the keepers of the after-hours, the unregistered guardians of the marina’s soul. We barter, mend, and drift. We know whose engine coughs at dawn, whose marriage has rotted, whose anchor chain rattled when it shouldn’t have. We remember every sound that doesn’t belong—and every person who does.
Sometimes, when the air is still, you’ll see us gathered near the water’s edge, trading stories the wind carries away. Some are true. Most are warnings. All are binding.
The outsiders call it camaraderie. We know it as survival.
On quiet nights, when the sea exhales and the lights along the jetty flicker, we hear the whisper of something older than any of us—a sound like ropes tightening, or bones shifting in the hull. It reminds us that every paradise demands a sacrifice. The question is never if—only who. Why doesn’t even come into it.
So we keep our secrets sealed tight, like closing hatches before a storm. The rest of the world doesn’t need to know what floats beneath the reflection of those perfect marina lights—or what waits beyond it.
Some things are better left submerged.
And if you ever wonder why the water feels different here—colder, somehow—it’s because it remembers. Every lie, every deal, every soul we’ve let drift away—it keeps them all. That’s why my killer hides here. He knows the cold. He understands the silence. He respects the marina code.
But to take a life inside our marina, he must first earn his place among us. He must learn the rhythm of the tides, the weight of a nod, the value of a secret. Only then can someone vanish without a trace, swallowed whole by the same black water that keeps us safe.
You’ll meet him in SEETHINGS II—and when you do, you’ll understand why some truths are best left beneath the surface.
–Michael (Dark fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)
SEETHINGS II follows the return of the Storm Killer as a body on a secluded beach in Moreton Bay ignites fear and denial. While police dismiss the link, the media doesn’t. Mitchell Felding forms a dangerous bond with a man who understands his darkest impulses. When Natasha enters his life, carrying love letters from her murdered mother, intimacy deepens, and truth closes in. Some futures are inherited. Some are escaped.
Discover more from Michael Forman – Author of Dark Fiction & Drama
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