The Lure
August travels with the Sunday Morning Transport include stories by Christopher Campbell, Curtis Chen, Marie Brennan, and Rick Wilber.
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In this month’s first, free story, Chris Campbell follows a research lead to unexpected places, for his Sunday Morning Transport debut. Please enjoy and share!
~ Julian and Fran, August 2, 2026
The Lure
by Chris Campbell
March 27, 1689.
Halley described the Polypus of St. Helena, which emits such an Inky Juice, but of a dark russet colour. This fish, called there a Cuttlefish, will walk on the dry land, on its points, as it were with Leggs, raising itselfe like a great long leggd spider.
Thomas Birch’s History of the Royal Society: Contents of the “Journal Book”
examined by Mr. H. W. Robinson
March 23, 2024.
As I lay heaving on the floor of my hotel room, damp, sandy, and stinking of low tide, it occurred to me, and not for the first time, that I never should have come to Saint Helena. There were numerous reasons I should have abandoned the project: the tepid support I’d received from my department, the forceful opposition of my mother to the nature of the work, and most of all, the fact that as long as I could remember, I hated the ocean.
There isn’t a definitive record of the first humans that came to the island. The Galician navigator João da Nova Castella is commonly cited as the one to discover it on March 13, 1502, while serving the king of Portugal.
Spanish traditions hold that their explorers discovered the island decades earlier. Keeping it a secret at first because of the advantage it gave them to have a hidden port in the middle of their Atlantic trade routes to take on fresh fruit and fresh water. And keeping the secret later because of their reason for abandoning the island.
Not secret enough, though, to stop the rumors from reaching the curious ears of Portuguese mariners of what the last Spanish crew to use the island as a port of call had discovered. The long, looping ropes of intestine tied end to end that welcomed them to the island—laid out in a manner that suggested some geometric intention, although the pattern, if there had been one, was lost to the gulls and crabs by the time they came ashore.
Then the search party they dispatched discovered the charred remains of every head of goat in an ash-filled crater on the same peak where nearly two hundred years later Edmond Halley established his observatory. Finally, as the Spanish hoisted their sails and prepared to flee, they noticed the bloated green-skinned corpses of the island’s caretakers bobbing up and down in the bay, clearly dead, but still twisting and twitching as they floated steadily closer to where the ship had taken anchor.
The Portuguese obviously saw through these Spanish lies, a transparent attempt to prey on the superstitions of gullible sailors in a ploy to seize Saint Helena, an emerald jewel in the king of Portugal’s imperial treasury.
Although permanent inhabitants were rare during the island’s Portuguese tenure, through my research, I became familiar with the story of a Franciscan friar who had been the island’s sole resident from 1545 until his disappearance some fifteen years later. His presence was recorded in numerous captains’ logs as the island’s sole inhabitant, although his name was not. Even his journals, most now dismissed as the ravings of a madman, were unsigned.
In his journals, the friar recorded at length evidence he claimed pointed to the island’s ancient inhabitation, including a finely crafted axe head and a series of strange statuettes carved from obsidian, which were among the artifacts he reported collecting. There are no natural sources of obsidian on the island, which suggests far-reaching ancient trade routes if the friar’s claims were true.
However, none of the evidence he claimed to have discovered was ever found; only his journals were recovered, and with them, the only clue to his disappearance was in his final entry: “I’ve been granted an audience with the king, what treasures I shall bring him.” The records of the royal court in Portugal include no such meeting nor even a hint of any correspondence between the court and the unknown friar stationed on the island of Saint Helena.
The reason I came to the island some 460 years after the friar departed was the role Saint Helena played in the transatlantic trade. Nearly a thousand ships a year took port at the island, their human cargo packed tightly into the bottom of their stinking hulls. Millions of captives whose suffering during the transit was only a prologue, but for those lucky few who escaped into the ocean’s embrace. Sometimes jumping alone to freedom, sometimes in pairs, clutching each other as they leapt, and sometimes a brave soul would vault from the deck, pulling one of their captors down with them, a fair trade to Olokun for a place within the walls of his treasure-filled Obi.
I’d come specifically to examine the aftermath of the British Empire outlawing the trade of human cargo. In the decade that followed the ban, over twenty-five thousand captives were pulled from the holds of slave ships by the men of the Royal Navy and deposited on Saint Helena, and there these liberated men, women, and children were left to die of thirst and starvation by their liberators.
My place as both the lead and only member of the expedition was the result of the death of my dear friend and mentor, Ozi Mngelo, the chair of both archaeology and Africana studies at “the University” in Essex, where I’d spent many years. Before his death, he’d uncovered a mass grave on Saint Helena with the remains of over eight hundred poor souls who’d perished due to British neglect. Upon returning to the States with his findings in hand, he secured the funding for a full round of satellite imagery of the island and, as a result, located another region with the telltale signs that suggested it might be a mass grave an order of magnitude larger than the one he already uncovered.
With his abrupt passing, the work of securing his legacy as one of the giants in our field fell on my shoulders, as would assembling his notes and my own into a manuscript worthy of what would certainly be his final posthumous publication. To me, it was one more chance to hunt for answers with him after his death left me with only questions.
Four days ago, right before I caught the three-legged flight to the island, the judge summoned me to dinner and issued her opinion.
“I love you, child. It’s a shame I didn’t raise you better. I don’t know when I failed you, but clearly, I did. My own son off to dig up other people’s graves. Mark my words, nothing good will come of this.”
Her opinions were harsh, but her scotch was expensive. I spent most of the forty-hour journey trying to sleep off the wicked hangover I’d earned defending myself from her scorn. But the immensity of the ocean below me made even the refuge of sleep difficult to find.
From the endless expanse of blue, I thought I could hear the ancestors singing out as I flew above their sunken bones, guiding me toward a sacred task. To bear witness to the evil waiting for the soul brave enough to unearth it and bring forth the cleansing fires of true judgment at last. In that, at least, I am my mother’s son.
A son who had to deal with the broken jar of honey water I’d found smashed in my luggage and soaking my clothes from a mother who would always be the daughter of a Gullah woman regardless of which robes she wore.
January 4, 2018.
Right now, we’re trying to promote our unique, remote island to tourists. And if we said St Helena has a unique magnetism, we wouldn’t be lying.
Andy Biggin and Yael Engbers of the University of Liverpool will arrive on St Helena on Saturday, Jan. 6th . . . It is believed that St Helena is located in a unique “chink” in the Earth’s magnetic field, which Andy called a “controversial topic” in his field of research while claiming that his findings could be Earth-shattering.
This project will test a hypothesis that this patch of weakness has appeared repeatedly in geological time because of unusual conditions beneath the surface.
By Emma Weaver, South Atlantic Media Services, published in The Sentinel
March 21, 2024.
The morning of the first day on the dig site was ant-filled, painful, and a total waste of time. The afternoon was worse in the way only succeeding could be. In a mass grave, nothing is simple; bodies turn and twist as they rot, and the ground beneath them, around them, and above them settles over the seasons. The hundred tiny bones in the hands and feet separate from the wrist and ankles and flow faster than the rest of the bones carried by the tropical sands of Saint Helena’s soil along the course of the watershed. Shoulders separate from clavicles, and ribs tear away from spines. While skulls, femurs, and hips are just as likely to sink toward the bedrock as they are to float to the surface.
That night, I went into the water.
The assistant I’d hired (well, technically, the second assistant—the first one quit not long after we’d started digging that morning) told me about the Pelagia noctiluca, or night-light jellyfish, and suggested a beach far away from the busy cove where I could watch them sparkle like sunken stars, something to take my mind off my gruesome work.
I hate the ocean, but something about those elusive blinking lights and the song whose chorus I’d first heard as I’d flown leeward and windward through the skies above the island on my circuitous flight path had only grown louder, pulling me toward the truth hiding beneath. Now, at the edge of the water, I was compelled as if by a magnetic force from the shoreline and into the bay, wading into the ocean until the bottom of my hips touched the cresting waves.
July 29, 2019.
Few wonders of the sunless depths appear quite so ghoulish or improbable as anglerfish, creatures that dangle bioluminescent lures in front of needlelike teeth. They are fish that fish.
Typically, the rod of flesh extending from the forehead glows at the tip. Anglerfish can wiggle the lure to better mimic living bait. Most species can open their mouths wide enough to devour prey whole, using their fangs not only as daggers but as bars of a cage.
“The Creepy Anglerfish Comes to Light,” William J. Broad, New York Times
March 22, 2024.
The following morning, my assistant failed to arrive at the agreed-upon time, and after a few hours of waiting, I concluded that they might not come at all. I managed to secure the services of my third assistant shortly before noon, at a significant premium over what I paid the first two. A young Saint (which is how the locals referred to themselves) who drove a surplus Land Rover that appeared to be older than the two of us put together.
That afternoon, I worked in fits and starts, tepidly brushing the bones I’d already uncovered the day before, scraping a handful of samples to return to the lab in Essex. Then, preparing to reinter the graves I’d disturbed so far before I moved on to the next position in the grid Professor Ozi established before his passing.
All the while, the matter of the rapid turnover of my workforce and the associated ballooning costs preyed on my mind. Eventually I simply asked my newest assistant if it was digging up the mass gravesites that had driven the first two away.
“Nah, boss. Bones sometimes just appear here. You don’t even need to go digging to find them. When I was a kid, we might play soccer with a skull that rolled down from the mountain or baseball with a leg bone until we’d tire of it and toss it into the sea. I’m sorry about that, but being kids, that’s the way we grew up. Nah, boss, those two quit because of what people are saying. You shouldn’t let it bother you, the Saints; here we all like to talk about strangers, with this island being so small and all. I’m embarrassed to even tell you, but from what I heard, people are saying you got the Gilly Gilly on you—not that I believe in that kind of thing.”
The Gilly Gilly is a concept older than the written word, with ancient icons and pictograms of it appearing in many distinct cultures around the globe throughout history. The ancient Greeks called it the ophthalmòs báskanos, while my ancestors might have called it the thiat before they were stolen from West Africa and the maljo after the Middle Passage. Today the term for the primal superstition that most people recognize is the “evil eye.”
Much like the old Portuguese explorers of Saint Helena saw through the lies of Spaniards, I saw this for what it was too. A calculated ploy to extract as much American funding as possible into the Saint pockets, somewhat underhanded but very understandable.
It was an unpleasant note to start a research trip on. But not nearly as unpleasant as the unwelcome email from the judge I found waiting for me when I returned to my rooms early that evening, covered in the grave dirt from my grim day’s work.
[I looked into your island some more after you left. The deeper I dig, the worse it gets. I read a story about a poor freed woman, more of a girl, really. They accused her of witchcraft and did the most terrible things to her, the people of your island. Cut her open and filled her gut with rocks before burying her inside the hollow of a tree trunk, all while she was still breathing. I kept picturing your gramma while I read it. You know that picture of her in the white dress when she was about fifteen or sixteen, wearing those black T-strap shoes, all elbows and knees? They’d have done the same to her, is what I thought, and you need to come home, is what I knew. I know your work there is important, I’m not saying it isn’t. But no harm comes to the dead from letting them rest, and maybe justice can wait when the guilty have long passed the reach of any retribution. If it’s a matter of funding, I’ll take care of you, that’s what family’s for. You don’t have to be so proud, I’m proud enough of you for both of us. Just come home, please come home.]
That night, I went back into the water, this time moving far beyond the safety of the inner bay past the point where my feet could still meet the sand beneath. Far past where a man who never learned to swim should dare to venture. What was the single voice of my mother calling me home against the chorus of my ancestors calling me toward my great purpose?
I allowed myself to float—buoyed by the salt water and weightless, almost boneless, suspended in the ocean. In the coolth of the bay, in the rhythm of the waves, I felt my mind expand, a reward of unassessable value I’d earned for following the call that lured me off the island’s shores. As if the very act of floating had loosed me from chains I never knew I wore and immersed me in memories and images from eons long past and those yet to come. It was like Father Time himself had retreated from his endless works to turn over the kindling of eternity to the fires of my awakening mind.
My mesmerization broke with dawn when the steady trade winds and receding tides deposited me on the shoreline, where scuttling crabs picked at the kelp that clung to my prone form. Weakened and exhausted, I crawled in fits and starts back to my cheap harborside hotel room, retching from the stink of the ocean that clung to me.
I spent the rest of the morning trying to ignore my disturbing behavior and promising myself that I would never return to the hateful waters again.
March 26th, 1848.
At 6:30 pm, the crew of corvette HMS Daedalus, while en route to St. Helena, recorded an encounter with a creature crew members identified as either an enormous serpent, a giant Kraken, or a leviathan at least one hundred feet long. Captain McQuhae of the Daedalus described a creature, both dark brown and yellowish white, whose head was held over twenty feet above the water. A creature whose features McQuhae would variously describe as fishlike, serpentine, and mammalian under questioning from the navy.
While the description of the creature is fantastical, the sighting itself was made during the failing light of the evening and is easily discounted. The behavior, however, of the creature as it is described during the encounter is consistent with the feeding habits of the sei baleen whale.
“MYSTERY of the Daedalus Kraken SOLVED”
(The Rational Skeptic, Vol. 18, Issue 8)
March 23, 2024.
That afternoon, I pressed a fifty-dollar bill into the hands of the Saint at the dive shop to ignore any questions he might have about the advanced deep diver PADI license I could offer him no proof of.
Walking home, dragging the cart I’d rented laden with scuba equipment, I made a point of ignoring the increasingly persistent offers to read my fortune or cleanse my aura from one Saint after the next. All women, some young and some old, and all of them wearing simple white dresses or white linen robes. They all kept calling to me over and over again in the unique island tones, known as Saint-speak, until I closed the door to my hotel room, shutting out their din of voices.
Three hours of Web videos later, I decided I was ready. Hours I should have spent in the field working on the project I’d promised I would finish. Hours I’ve spent ensorcelled by the idea that started burning in the back of my mind that the real discoveries I needed to make were beneath the waves and not the dirt. My real purpose on this island, that which had brought me to this fortuitous place and time, was what I would find in the depths not far from the shore.
In 1677, a young Edmond Halley arrived at Saint Helena with a single mission: to chart the stars of the southern sky with exactitude. Upon his return to England, he publicly claimed that the endeavor was a great success, but in his private letters, he admitted that too many cloudy nights had left him with too little to do and too much time to think.
Time, he spent obsessing about the ocean. An obsession that resulted in Halley conceiving of and diagramming the invention that he named the diving bell during his stay on the island. After a decade and many permutations of the initial design, he eventually built a working bell that allowed him to explore up to sixty feet beneath the surface. With his invention strapped to the deck of the ship he now captained, he returned to Saint Helena. There are no records of what he might have found off the island’s shores with the assistance of his ingenious device, and if my instincts were correct at only sixty feet, he would have found nothing. The modern scuba equipment I rented today would allow me to dive twice as far as that with ease, and much, much deeper with some measure of risk.
Another bribe and a few lies later, first about my nautical competency and then about my intentions, and I’d secured a vessel for the evening.
The first rule of diving, and one they’d gone over again and again in the videos I’d watched, was never to dive alone. The last promise I made to the kid who rented me his father’s boat was that I’d take great care of it during a night of lure fishing.
I broke the first rule and my last promise in the same moment, plunging backward off the side of the hull, the diving weights on my belt propelling me to the depths I sought.
I’d realized by now that the song that called to me was not the chorus of the ancestors but the polyphonic crooning of a singular sleeping mind of such great powers. It was the music of its ancient dreams and waiting hunger. It was the answer to the question that plagued me—where would justice be found? For hunger, like justice, only waits so long.
They speak of darkness in the deeps of the ocean and the silence beneath its waves, as if these are the things to fear, but in truth, these things are a comfort. What I found below was far too much brilliant, blaring light—burning light that announces what hunger is waking and the new world to come.
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Thank you for joining our journey this week.
Chris Campbell’s stories have appeared in Asimov’s, FIYAH, khōréō, and more. He is the editor of the award-winning New Year, New You: A Speculative Anthology of Reinvention. His research and critical analysis have appeared in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts and Speculative Insight.
Chris has received the generous support of the Massachusetts Cultural Council and recognition from Boston’s Office of Arts and Culture for his ongoing contributions to Afrofuturist and speculative literature. He is also the recipient of the Boston Writers of Color Community Engagement Literary Award presented by GrubStreet.
A graduate of the Clarion West and Viable Paradise workshops, Chris is completing an MFA in creative writing at Emerson College, where he is a writing instructor.
Represented by Sara Megibow of Megibow Literary.
Follow him at @chriscampbell.bsky.social or visit www.clundycampbell.com.
“The Lure” © Chris Campbell, 2026.
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