The Hold

The plan was flawless: a four-day "Un-New Year's" cruise in the Caribbean, returning on the 30th. They'd miss the post-Christmas crash, dodge the forced cheer of January 1st, and re-enter reality as if stepping from a time machine. Perfection.

The plan ended at 3:17 PM on December 27th with a sound like God tearing a sheet of steel.

The S.S. Resplendent, a floating city of joy, gave a violent, groaning shudder. Every light died. The artificial breeze in the atrium vanished, replaced by stifling, vacuum-sealed heat. The floor tilted, not the gentle roll of waves, but a sickening, ten-degree list that sent a grand piano sliding across the marble in a shriek of strings and splintering wood.

Captain Vorstad’s voice, when it crackled over the PA, was stripped of its bonhomie. It was pure, cold metal. “All guests to muster stations. Now. This is not a drill.”

Maya clung to the chrome railing of the central staircase, her stomach somewhere near her throat. David’s hand was a vice on her elbow. Around them, the curated paradise descended into a Bosch painting of panic. A woman in a sequinned bikini top wept openly. A man in a captain’s hat he’d bought from the gift shop was screaming about his rights.

They spent the first night in the theatre, packed in with eight hundred other souls. The air grew thick with the smell of sweat and fear. The crew, faces grim under emergency headlamps, distributed bottled water and protein bars. The story trickled down in whispers: not an engine failure, but a catastrophic fracture in a propeller shaft. A rogue, unseen iceberg of metal fatigue. The ship wasn’t just dead; it was critically wounded, taking on water in a forward compartment. The pumps were holding, for now. A tug was 48 hours away.

Two days. In the dead centre of the Atlantic. In the dead centre of the holiday void.

On the second day, the Resplendent began to sing.

It started as a low moan in the deep hull, a bass note of stressed metal. Then came the percussive BANG from the bowels of the ship - a hydraulic fist slamming against a bulkhead every thirty-seven minutes. The ship’s slow, perpetual list made every movement a chore. Walking felt like climbing a hill. Sitting felt like clinging to a slope. The world was permanently off-kilter.

Their cabin was a tomb tilted on its side. David fiddled obsessively with a satellite messenger, its tiny screen blinking SEARCHING FOR NETWORK… in an endless, silent scream.

“We’re a ghost,” he muttered. “We’re not even a dot on a map right now.”

Maya didn’t answer. She stared at the porthole. The view was no longer a serene blue expanse. It was a tilted frame of churning grey, the horizon a jagged, unsettling line. The vastness outside was no longer beautiful; it was hungry. It mirrored the hollow, directionless ache that had been inside her since October, since the quiet ultrasound, since the planned future had simply… stopped. They’d booked this trip to outrun that feeling. Now, the universe had trapped them in its perfect, brutal metaphor.

The planned delights of the ship became taunts. The zip line hung motionless over a silent pool. The robotic bartenders stood frozen mid-shake. Maya found the "Sky Walk" - a glass-bottomed walkway that had jutted thrillingly over the sea. Now, it jutted over nothing but vertiginous, heaving grey. She stepped onto it. The glass was cold. Below her feet, the angry sea frothed and spat. It felt like standing on the edge of a wound in the world.

Other plans crumbled faster. The group of finance bros from Miami, who’d planned the ultimate party, had raided the crew’s liquor stores. Their laughter on the lido deck had turned sharp, then violent. A fight broke out over the last bottle of gin, a pathetic, clumsy brawl on the slanted deck. Security, overwhelmed, let it happen. The social contract was dissolving with the Wi-Fi signal.

But it was the silence that was the true enemy. Not the absence of noise, but the presence of the wrong noises. The drip of unseen water. The skittering of something - rats or debris - in the ceiling panels. The distant, rhythmic bang… bang… bang from below.

On the third morning - December 29th - a new sound. A deep, guttural groan that vibrated through the deck plates and up into their bones. The ship lurched, settling another degree. The list was now pronounced. Coffee mugs slid off tables. A collective gasp swept through the ship.

The Captain’s voice returned, frayed at the edges. “The tug is on the horizon. However. A weather system is accelerating. It will reach us before they can establish a tow line. We are… battening down.”

The storm didn’t arrive with clouds. It arrived with a colour. The uniform grey outside deepened to a bruised purple, then a sickly green. The wind’s whistle became a shriek in the rigging. The sea transformed from heaving grey to a chaos of black mountains and seething white valleys.

The Resplendent was no longer adrift. It was a 100,000-ton punching bag.

The first wave hit the starboard side like a asteroid. The ship groaned, rolled violently to port, and for a terrifying second, Maya was certain it wouldn’t right itself. Everything not bolted down became a missile. A lounge chair smashed through a glass door. The bang from below became a constant, terrifying shriek of metal.

Maya and David were thrown against the wall of their cabin. In the greenish emergency light, she saw real terror in his eyes. Not frustration, but the primal kind. He reached for her, not to steady her, but because he was falling.

“I’m sorry,” he shouted over the storm’s fury. The words were ripped away, but she saw them on his lips.

Sorry for the dead ship? Sorry for the storm? Sorry for the silent, aching space that had grown between them since the life they’d planned had vanished? It didn’t matter. The apology was for everything. For being powerless. For being in the hold.

A colossal wave slammed into the stern. The ship shuddered, and every light died, plunging them into absolute, roaring blackness. The only illumination was the frantic, strobing glow of the lightning through the porthole, freezing the chaos in snapshots of hellish clarity.

In that darkness, with the world screaming and breaking apart around them, the last of the plan evaporated. There was no future to outrun, no past to mourn. There was only this: the next breath, the next roll, the desperate grip of his hand in hers.

A final, apocalyptic CRACK echoed through the ship, louder than the thunder. A sound of something fundamental giving way.

Then, silence.

Not the absence of sound, but a sudden, thick, shocking blanket of it. The wind still screamed, but it was distant, muffled. The ship’s groaning ceased. The bang stopped.

The emergency lights flickered back on, weak and yellow.

The Resplendent was still tilted. But it was no longer rolling. It was… stuck. Canted at a twenty-degree angle, but stable. As if it had been speared on something solid in the deep, black water.

The PA system hissed, dead.

David scrambled to the porthole, wiped away the salt spray. He stared out, then back at Maya, his face pale in the sickly light.

“The tug,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “It’s gone. The lights are just… gone.”

Maya joined him. The storm raged, but in a circle around them, the sea was a bizarre, foaming caldera. The Resplendent was at its centre, impaled on an unmoving, unseen fulcrum in the absolute middle of the raging Atlantic.

The horizon had vanished. There was only the violent weather, and their trapped, broken ship, holding its breath in the eye of a different kind of storm.

The wait was over. They weren’t waiting for rescue anymore. They were waiting to understand what they had become, and what, in the deep, dark hold beneath them, was finally holding on.

The End

David Hughes writes fiction and poetry attuned to silence, place and attention mainly focussed on the Cornish coast. The Hold is a seabound departure - a gothic parable of obsession and isolation that drifts away from his usual shores of memory, labour, and unspoken histories.