Laughter in the Tide Pool

The laughter came first, easy and bright. It carried across the warm air of Crystal Cove, rolling over the graded sand, catching the edges of sunlight like a bell.

Mark and Amber Bennet ran hand in hand, half drunk from the bottle of chilled white wine they’d downed during lunch, letting their footprints dissolve in the tide washed sand. The wind off the Pacific smelled of salt and seaweed, dry driftwood, and the faint tang of something else, metallic and hidden.

Above them, the small rental cottage perched like a fragile ornament on the cliff, a drooping line of eucalyptus and brick spilling toward the edge. The street had been empty when they arrived, the world briefly theirs, a quiet stolen paradise.

Amber spun, her arms wide, copper hair catching the sunlight. “It’s like it’s waiting just for us,” she said, her voice carried by the breeze.

Mark laughed, chest warm with joy. “I suppose it’s a pretty thoughtful ocean, then.”

They were two days into their honeymoon, a drive west from their inland hometown of Corona, leaving the dry heat and desert smog behind for cool coastal air.

Laguna Beach had always been an escape: alive, vibrant, pulsing with artists and color. But this stretch, Crystal Cove, was quieter. The locals rarely wandered this far down, where private walkways threaded through dripping bougainvillea to secret coves and tide pools.

Amber had found the cove online, searching “hidden beaches around Laguna” while Mark packed their picnic. “There’s this little alcove, only accessible at low tide,” she said. “They say it feels like your own world.”

He’d smiled, thinking it too perfect to exist. Now, walking barefoot with the ocean nipping at his toes, he considered that she might be right.

The tide was low, leaving pools that shimmered with trapped miniature worlds. Starfish clung to green glass, tiny beige crabs skittered through shadow, and translucent shrimp darted between rocks. Amber bent to watch, breath fogging in the faint chill. She giggled when a shrimp vanished from her finger.

“That one’s your twin,” Mark teased. “Always running away when someone tries to pet you.”

She splashed him lightly. “You pop off like that again, mister, and I’m going to push you into one of these things.”

For a moment, they were just two people in love, impossibly alive, as if forever belonged to them.

Amber’s eyes, however, caught a narrow slice of darkness in the cliffside, hidden beneath a drop of stone and heavy kelp. A cave.

“Oh, look,” she said. “That’s got to go somewhere mysterious.”

Mark shaded his eyes, feeling a knot of unease. “Or it’s where the tide murders stupid people who chase ghosts.”

“Don’t ruin it,” she said, smiling. “C’mon.”

He hesitated. “We said we’d be back before the tide changed.”

“Just a quick peek. Please?”

That word, please, always undid him. He followed her up the slick rock shelf, heart twitching between affection and unease.

The cave was smaller than it had looked from above, more a slit than an opening. Cool air spilled out, smelling of iron, salt, and rot. Amber shivered, but her smile remained.

“Just a picture, and we’ll go. Deal?”

He sighed. “Deal.”

The first steps inside swallowed the sunlight. Their phone beams stretched only a dozen feet before fading into black. The entrance narrowed, then opened slightly, polished smooth where ancient water had worn the stone. Tiny rivulets ran down the walls, licking their ankles.

“Listen,” Amber whispered. “It sounds like…like it’s humming.”

He paused. Not wind, not water, but a low, resonant vibration. It thrummed through his ribs.

“Maybe it’s shells in the rock,” he said, forcing a laugh. His voice sounded alien in the hollow cave, swallowed and returned warped.

They moved deeper, drawn by a gravity that made no sense. The walls were streaked with veins of silver and embedded shells, spiraled fossils, twisted ancient forms that caught the light in faint gleams. Amber’s grin flickered. “Okay, this is creepier than I thought. Picture time.”

They posed briefly, laughing into the phones. Then a low rumble shuddered through the stone.

Mark’s laughter died. “Did you feel that?”

Before Amber could respond, the cave howled. The ocean surged inside like a living thing, a roar that made itself felt against stone and bone. The entrance collapsed in a single thunderous crash. Daylight vanished.

Amber screamed. Mark grabbed her, shielding her from falling fragments. Cold seawater surged around them, rising past their knees. Then, as quickly as it came, it receded into cracks, leaving thick mud, salt, and a stench that clung to their skin.

He shone his phone toward the entrance. Where sunlight had been was now packed with black stone, shards of shells, and tangled kelp.

“Amber,” he stammered. “It’s…blocked.”

She pressed against the rubble. “No, no! This can’t be happening!”

Panic clawed at him. “The tide will drop. Maybe we can move smaller pieces.”

Their phones cast twin cones of light into the dripping darkness. Steam rose faintly, as if the cave exhaled.

Time fractured. Minutes or hours passed, neither could tell. They called for help. Nothing. No cell phone signal, no echo beyond the walls but their own voices, warped, strange. Sometimes the calls seemed answered by another voice, whispering slightly behind them.

Mark began mapping the cavern with dim light. Not large, thirty feet across at its widest, but above, a shaft hinted at escape. Or so he hoped. Wet, black, impossibly smooth stone glinted from the fissure.

Amber tried to stay calm, recounting the drive over, her mother, their jobs. Her laughter died midway to nervous hums.

Then water seeped again. First puddles, then a thin sheet across the floor.

“Tide’s coming in,” Mark murmured.

“No,” she whispered. “It’s not supposed to happen like this.”

Cold water brushed her feet, then thighs. They climbed a narrow ledge along the wall, slick with algae. His hands shook; hers clutched his sleeve.

Hours passed. Time lost what was left of its broken order.

Mark saw flashes of light where none should be. Once, green, once pale white. Sometimes a shape under the water, a hand, a serpent curling and vanishing.

“Amber, did you see that?” he asked, heart hammering.

She did not answer. She stared at the blocked entrance, lips moving silently.

Then she said barely audibly, “It’s whispering. The rocks, and they sound like people. Like they’re laughing.”

He held her close. “We’re just terrified and tired. There’s no one here but us.”

Yet the laughter persisted in the ears of both of them now, low, hollow, and seemingly pressing against their chests. The cave seemed to breathe. The walls were pulsing faintly with every heartbeat.

When he blinked, he saw them, even though he knew it was not possible. He could see their reflections in the slick mineral wall, but not quite themselves. Amber’s face tilted unnaturally, mouth widening beyond reason, teeth too many, smile too deep.

He shut off the light. “Don’t look at the walls,” he whispered.

Her voice trembled. “Mark, something’s in here with us.”

A dragging scrape followed, as if something heavy moved beneath the water. Mark shone his light. Ripples, nothing more.

He laughed dryly. “It’s just the rocks settling.”

But the unnerving laughter beneath it persisted.

The water crept higher, inch by inch, and the cave seemed to pulse with it, the stone walls exhaling and contracting in a rhythm that mirrored Mark’s own heartbeat. Each tide pushed him closer to panic, each wave carrying with it a metallic, hollow laugh that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.

Amber clung to his arm, small and trembling, her face pale in the dim light. “Mark,” she whispered, voice tight with fear. “I think I see another way. Up there.” She pointed to a fissure above the ledge, narrow and slick with algae, barely wide enough for a body to squeeze through. Faint light glimmered from within it, a shimmer of hope in the oppressive dark.

Mark’s chest tightened. He forced calm. “I’ll give you a boost. You crawl up to see where it leads.”

Amber nodded, jaw tight, eyes wide. He lifted her, hands slick, fingers scraping against cold stone. “There you go, you’re almost there.”

Then the sound came, a sharp, echoing crack that split the air and rattled the walls. The cave shivered violently. A wedge of rock broke loose. Amber screamed. Mark lunged to move them both out of its path, but it struck her spine, sending her crumpling into his arms as he fell into the water.

Her cry cut off in a strangled, choking sound, impossible to identify as one made by a human. Mark held her, trembling, water now up to his chest, mind fraying. Her body was limp and lifeless. He pressed his forehead to hers, willing warmth into her, whispering apologies and promises.

Hours, or maybe days, passed. Time became a river without banks. The tide ebbed and returned in slow, monstrous breaths. Mark talked to her non stop, telling her she was okay, that the tide would recede, that they’d laugh about this someday. Sometimes, for a fraction of a second, her lips twitched, a memory of a smile flickering in the intermittent light of his dying phone.

The cave seemed alive. The walls breathed, throbbing in faint rhythms, shadows shifting, faces emerging in the mineral streaks. Not carved, not shaped, just suggested, eyes and mouths that mouthed words he could not hear yet somehow understood, “Stay…stay with us…forever…”

Mark’s vision began to betray him. Reflections in the slick walls moved independently. Amber’s face stretched, jaw widening, teeth multiplying, her eyes glimmering with phosphorescent light. He blinked, rubbed his face, and it returned to normal, only to distort again when he dared to look.

The water rose past his chin. He tilted his face upward, tasting salt and iron, whispering her name in rhythm with the tide, listening for the cave’s response. The laughter beneath it, faint, hollow, layered, pressed against his chest. He pressed closer to Amber, whose body seemed to pulse faintly, as if the cave itself had claimed her as part of its rhythm.

Sometimes he swore she moved. Sometimes he was sure he could hear her whisper. But her words were fragments of memory, half formed and impossible. She told him it was quiet, that it was safe, that he should rest. The voice was hers but innately not hers. He repeated her name over and over again, like a prayer, a chant, a surrender.

Mark no longer distinguished the past from the present. He crawled along the ledge when the water reached his shoulders, searching for the fissure Amber had tried to reach. Each step made the walls sigh, each breath returned warped, echoing whispers in multiple tones. His mind spun stories from the absence of all else he had ever known. It churned out childhood memories, conversations long ago, imagined voices of friends and strangers. The cave took them, twisted them, fed them back in echoing fragments.

At some point, he stopped moving. He let the water press against him, letting it lift and float him in the shallow pool that filled the cavern. His hands rested on Amber’s shoulders, which had gone cold and rigid yet flickered in hallucination with the fragments of light that shone in. He whispered. He prayed. He begged to survive this.

The cave responded. Walls pulsed more strongly, faces multiplying, whispering: stay…stay… The light from his phone dimmed until it was a faint halo, barely illuminating a space a few feet around him. The sound of waves outside, once familiar, became a muted, threatening presence. The tide seemed endless, each breath of water and stone stretching seconds into eternity.

Mark tried to close his eyes. Darkness came, but even there, he saw shapes: shadows behind shadows, mouths opening and closing, reflections that were not reflections. Amber’s eyes glimmered, calling him. He leaned forward, kissed her forehead, whispered, “We’ll be together soon, my love. We’ll be together forever.”

The water rose to his chin. Then to his nose. He tilted his head back. The cave exhaled. His heartbeat matched its rhythm. He became aware only of the pulse, the cold, the hollow laughter that had been following him since the first step inside.

Somewhere above, beyond the black stone that had sealed the entrance, the night pressed against the cove. Moonlight folded across the sand, smoothing every footprint, leaving the beach empty and undisturbed. Dark waves folded over themselves, erasing all trace.

A sea gull cried once, distant, high above the cliffs, the sound bouncing against rock and sea. Then silence reclaimed the world.

Mark whispered her name one last time.

And then there was nothing but pure silence intermittently interrupted with the pulse of water against stone, the faint hollow laughter of the cave itself, patient and eternal.