The Quantum Shore

On the coast of Maine, at the far end of a quiet cove, there is a stretch of still water the old-timers call Dead Man's Arm. One summer afternoon in 1953, a family went out on it to celebrate a birthday. By morning, their boat was riding at anchor five miles out to sea with no one aboard, and the cake on the kitchen table had never been cut. The police called it a drowning. The town brought casseroles. But the Chief had seen a man in that boat who was nineteen hundred miles away, and out past the point, when the fog rolls in, a light still comes on with no one there to shine it. It has happened before. It will happen again. Every twenty years, the river comes back for someone.

Some lights are meant to be followed.

Howard Tucker is a novelist, musician, and artist based in Swindon, UK. His work blends psychological tension with atmospheric, slow-burn storytelling, creating worlds that feel both familiar and unsettling. He writes character-driven fiction shaped by quiet places, strange edges, and the thin lines between reality and imagination.