Delivered Before Dawn

I move. Low, fast, along the edge of the pallets, my shoes whispering on wet planks. The fog is so thick that the pier lamps are just smeared yellow bruises, and the world narrows to a tunnel of grey, the planks beneath me, and the breath in my throat. Behind me I hear nothing. That is the worst part. The figure should be following. Instead there is only the soft, constant slap of water, and a feeling between my shoulder blades like a hand held an inch from my back. I reach a rusted ladder, the pier’s old maintenance access, and the phone buzzes in my fist: “Not the ladder. Left.” I go left. A narrow gap between two storage sheds opens in the fog like a door I almost missed, and I slip into it and press my back against corrugated metal that is slick and freezing. My lungs burn. I try to slow my breathing and fail. For almost a full minute I do nothing but stand there shaking, and the calm that settles over me is so sudden and so strange that I nearly weep. It is the calm of a held breath. The fog hums. The ferry horn sounds again, farther now. I think of my mother, who once told me that the dead are not far, only early, and I did not understand what she meant, and I am not sure I understand it now.
The stranger is already in the gap when I open my eyes.
She is sitting on an overturned bucket in the dark between the sheds, an old woman in a yellow rain slicker, a thermos balanced on her knee, as casual as if she were waiting out a rainstorm at a bus stop. I almost scream. She raises one finger to her lips, gently, like a librarian, and I swallow the sound. Her face is deeply lined and oddly serene, and her eyes, when they catch the weak light, are a pale and watery blue. “You’re the one getting the letters,” she whispers. Her accent is soft, Scottish, worn smooth by decades somewhere else. “Elspeth Duffy. I was a dockhand here thirty years. I get them too, sometimes. Not as many as you.” I stare at her. I cannot speak. She unscrews the thermos, pours something steaming into the cap, and offers it to me with a hand that does not shake at all. “Drink. It’ll do you more good than fear.” I do not drink it. I ask her, in a voice like paper tearing, who is sending them. She smiles, and it is not a comforting smile. “That’s the question, isn’t it? I used to think it was God. Then I thought it was the dead. Now I think it’s just… us. Something that’s us, later, writing back to warn us.” She pauses. “Or something that wants us to think so.”
The phone in my hand goes dark. For the first time in three weeks, there is no message at all.
And then, without warning, everything speeds up. A flashlight beam slices through the fog from the far end of the pier, and I hear men’s voices, two or three of them, and the heavy grinding groan of a forklift engine turning over. Container 4471 is coming. I can feel the vibration through the soles of my shoes. Elspeth grips my wrist with startling strength and pulls me down beside her, and we crouch in the gap while headlights swing past the mouth of it, white and blinding, and the forklift rumbles by close enough that I can smell the diesel and hot rubber. A rust-red container, its number stenciled in chipped white paint, sways on the forks. 4471. They set it down not thirty feet from where we hide, and one of the men walks to its doors and begins working the heavy latch. I know I should look away. Everything in me says to look away. But I have come all this way, and I lean forward until the edge of the shed presses against my cheek, and I watch the doors swing open on a darkness that seems, somehow, to be looking back.
There is nothing inside.

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About the Author

Helena Ward — a crisis psychologist writing ordinary people thrown straight into survival mode. She turns stress into words and stories.

— Helena Ward

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October 27, 2026

10min-stories