The first thing Dale Pruitt noticed was the silence. There were no crickets, no wind, nothing. Heron’s Cove had gone completely silent, and that never happened, especially on a hot July night.

Dale stood on the back porch of the harbormaster’s office, holding a cold beer in his right hand. His tired eyes peered into the horizon, watching the fog roll in off the water. The smell of brine reached his nostrils, and he took a deep breath, taking it all in. Being so close to the sea was one of the best parts of his job, if not the very best.

The calmness was supposed to be appreciated and even enjoyed for what it was, but Dale’s instincts whispered differently. The fog was moving against the breeze, curling in spirals around the dock pilings. It was as if it were feeling its way forward with conscious intent rather than just drifting.

Dale set the beer down on the railing and stretched while trying to suppress a yawn. The night was already long, and he was tired, but he couldn’t afford to lose his focus now. Whatever was making him feel uneasy needed to be investigated.

A full moon emerged from a blanket of clouds, shining its bright light onto his furrowed brow. He inspected his surroundings and momentarily stopped breathing when he saw something move on Pier Three.

Dale squinted. His glasses were inside on the desk, but he didn’t need them to know that the shadow slithering at the end of the pier didn’t belong there.

It was something tall, elongated, its proportions wrong in a way his brain kept trying to correct and couldn’t. It had two arms, a torso, and something like a woman’s head with dark hair hanging before her face, but below the waist, the silhouette split and multiplied into a tangle of long, malleable legs that spread out from her hips.

The legs, thin as tentacles, or maybe a spider’s limbs, rippled over the wooden planks without making a sound. The head lifted slightly, and through the strands of dark, wet hair, Dale thought he saw the pale glimmer of an eye. It was looking right at him.

For a moment, the thing wavered there, as if rejoicing in its impossible geometry, and Dale froze. All the legends of Heron’s Cove rushed through his mind in a disordered jumble: the mournful mermaids, the drowned sailors and pirates locked in a perpetual feud inside their sunken graveyards, and the old, darker tales about eldritch abominations that would make H. P. Lovecraft proud. The shape on the pier was something like that, a forsaken abomination given form in the moonlit fog.

Dread filled his mind, but it wasn’t alone. A wild, hysterical thought had also taken root there. He glanced behind him to see the beer, waiting for him to take another sip.

Dale had bought it from Jake, the new kid at the bait shop. He was a weird fellow, with glassy eyes and his arms covered in colorful tattoos. Had the little punk slipped something in the can? A bad trip could cause hallucinations, and hallucinations explained everything he thought he was seeing. He wanted, desperately, to believe it.

The thing on the pier inched forward, fixed on him. Dale bit his tongue. Drugged or not, the primal part of his brain, the one that recognized a predator, screamed at him to move. His hand, still resting on the railing, was numb. He forced his fingers to move, feeling the rough grain of the wood underneath. It was solid. This was really happening!

A low, wet clicking sound drifted across the water. It seemed to come from the thing. It wrapped around Dale, like a probe scanning the inner workings of his mind.

He took a stumbling step back, his heel scuffling loudly on the porch board. The clicking stopped instantly, and the creature froze, an inky statue highlighted against the moonlight.

Then, with a speed that made Dale’s heart jump, it thrust forward, its multiple appendages contracting and expanding. It scuttled down the length of the pier toward him.

Dale’s paralysis released him. He turned, fumbling for the screen door handle. He yanked it open and rushed inside, a familiar place that felt anything but safe now.

He plunged into the dark office. First, he retrieved his glasses from the desk and then reached for his phone to call the sheriff’s station. His other hand groped along the wall for the light switch and flipped it up.

Nothing happened. The overhead bulb remained dark, giving the otherworldly presence an advantage as it continued to rush toward him.

Dale stumbled toward the filing cabinet, his shoulder clipping the edge of the desk and sending a spike of pain down his arm. No one had answered from the sheriff’s station, and the phone was now a dead plastic brick in his hand. He needed his gun, asap.

He kept it in his desk drawer. The lock was simple, and the key was always in it, but his hand shook as he turned it. The nerves were starting to get to him. Dale’s palm closed around the familiar, worn grip of his revolver.

A slithering sound rasped against the outer wall of the building, followed by a series of soft taps on the wooden steps of the porch. It was at the door. He could hear the screen door’s hinge whine in protest as something heavy pressed against it. The main door was still closed, but it wouldn’t hold.

Dale backpedaled, raising the gun, his thumb finding and releasing the safety as he leveled it at the doorway. The silhouette of the thing filled the screen, the multitude of limbs shifting and coiling just beyond the threshold.

He pulled the trigger. The bullet tore through the screen, punching a hole in the wire mesh. However, the thing didn’t flinch. It was as if the shot had passed through empty air where its chest should have been.

Dale stared, his mind refusing to process what his eyes had just failed to see. He’d aimed center mass. He’d seen the barrel align. The shot was true. Yet the creature continued its advance, unbothered, one of its many thin limbs now curling around the edge of the main door, beginning to push it inward.

The wood of the door frame groaned under a pressure that seemed immense. A cold draft, smelling of deep ocean and decay, flooded into the office. Dale fired again, and then a third time, the flashes from the muzzle briefly illuminating the cramped room. Each shot was the same. The bullets seemed to find no purchase, vanishing into the foggy darkness of the thing’s form without effect.

The door gave way with a splintering crack, swinging inward to slam against the wall. The thing flowed into the doorway, its impossible height requiring it to stoop, its head of dark hair brushing the top of the frame. The pale eye glimmered at him from within that curtain of hair, and Dale knew, with a certainty that turned his blood to ice, that conventional weapons were useless.

Dale dropped the revolver, the clatter on the floorboards absurdly loud. Stripped of all other options, his survival instinct screamed a single command: Run.

He didn’t think. Bolting past the creature’s looming form, he felt a rush of that cold, wet air brushing against his shoulder. Dale ducked, lunged for the shattered doorway, and exploded out onto the porch. The night swallowed him as he hit the gravel path.

Dale ran. He ran like he hadn’t since he was a boy, legs pumping, breath sawing in his throat. The fog curled around him, disorienting, turning familiar landmarks into vague shadows. He could hear it behind him - a skittering, multi-limbed cadence on the gravel, then a softer, wetter slithering as it left the path for the grass. It was fast. God, it was so fucking fast! The sound seemed to come from everywhere at once, echoing off the silent buildings of the marina.

Dale veered left, away from the open water, aiming for the dense thicket of pines ahead. Branches whipped his face as he crashed into the woods, the undergrowth tearing at his jeans. He risked a glance back and wished he hadn’t. The thing was still in pursuit, a darting shadow between the trees, rapidly closing the distance.

A root snagged his foot. Dale pitched forward with a grunt, the world upending. He hit the damp earth hard, the impact driving the air from his lungs. For a second, he lay stunned, pine needles scratching his cheek, the taste of soil and decay in his mouth. The skittering stopped, right above him.

He tried to scramble up and crawl away, but it was too late. Something cold and smooth, like wet rope, wrapped around his ankle. He kicked, but another limb lashed around his calf, then his thigh. He thrashed, rolling onto his back, just as more of those thin, powerful appendages descended upon him.

They coiled around his arms, pinning them to his sides. Another looped around his chest, constricting like a boa. He gasped, the pressure making his ribs ache. The creature loomed over him, her dark hair hanging like a veil, that single pale eye fixed upon him with an alien curiosity. Her lower limbs were everywhere, winding around his legs and his throat in a loose but inescapable hold.

Dale was being enveloped. The limbs pulled him slightly off the ground, cocooning him in a cage of living, chill flesh. The smell of the deep ocean was overwhelming now, a briny, ancient rot that almost made him pass out. He wished he had.

His jaw was forced wide. A thick, rope-like tendril slid over his tongue, its surface impossibly smooth. It pushed past his gag reflex without remorse, a slimy intrusion that filled his throat and choked all sound.

Dale convulsed, his body straining against the cocoon of limbs, but he was utterly immobilized. The pressure in his esophagus was a constant, violating ache that promised to split him open. His lungs screamed for air they would never get.

Then, a new sensation bloomed behind his eyes, a pressure not of the physical world. It felt like a cold finger probing the soft tissue of his brain. A low hum vibrated through the tendril in his throat, resonating deep inside his skull. His frantic, terrified thoughts began to fray and dissolve.

In their place, a foreign calmness seeped in, thick and syrupy. It wasn’t his. It carried with it a profound, ancient loneliness, the crushing pressure of the abyssal plain, the patient, slow turn of millennia. Memories flickered out of sight and care, edited… rewritten.

He was no longer Dale Pruitt, harbormaster of Heron’s Cove. He was a vessel, being filled with a silent, terrible song. The creature’s single, pale eye was all he could see, and he felt himself falling into it, tumbling down into the dark, cold intelligence that had been waiting for him. The need to struggle left his body, and he went still.

The tendril retracted from his throat with a soft, wet pop. His mouth flooded with blood. The limbs uncoiled from his body, withdrawing into the shadowy knot of the creature’s lower half. Dale slumped to the pine-needle floor. He did not cough or gasp. He simply lay there, breathing the cold, rotten air in and out.

A command echoed in the silence of his mind. More than a voice, it was a crystalline imperative that filled every hollow space within his brain.

Arise.

Dale stood and brushed damp leaves from his shirt. The creature looked at him. Through the veil of hair, that pale eye held him in place. It was no longer a predator’s gaze. It was an owner’s. An absolute certainty settled in Dale’s chest. He was her drone. This was the only fact that mattered.

She turned and began to move back toward the harbor. Dale fell into step behind her without a thought, his boots crunching on the forest floor in time with her skittering rhythm.

His own mind was a quiet, dark pool. The old memories were there, but distant, like scenes from a movie he’d once watched. Heron’s Cove. The harbormaster’s office. The beer on the railing. They held no meaning anymore.

They emerged from the pines. The fog was thicker now, clinging to the docks in gelatinous sheets. The abomination flowed ahead of him, a darker smudge in the gray. She paused at the edge of Pier Three, where he had first seen her. Her head tilted, as if listening to a frequency only she could hear.

A new imperative unfolded within him. The water. Prepare the way.

Dale walked past her and reached the end of the pier. Below, the black water lapped gently against the barnacled pilings. He knew what to do. He kneeled, the wet wood soaking through the knees of his jeans, and began to untie the thick, salt-crusted ropes that secured the old maintenance skiff. His fingers, which had fumbled with a simple key minutes before, now worked with swift, efficient knots. The boat was freed.

He stood, pushing the skiff out so it floated a few feet from the dock. Then he waited, hands at his sides, staring at the empty water. He did not wonder why. The command was the reason.

The creature approached. She did not board the skiff. Instead, she extended one of her long, thin limbs toward the water’s surface. The tip of it pierced the black mirror without a ripple. A low, subsonic vibration trembled through the pier, up through Dale’s boots and into his bones.

Out in the bay, the water began to bubble as if a great heat source were churning the depths. A whirlpool began to form, its center growing darker than the surrounding water. From that deepening vortex, a shape rose, pushing the water aside with a deep, groaning sigh.

It was a spire of black, glistening stone, veined with pulsating, phosphorescent green. It rose higher, water streaming from its impossible angles, revealing more of its structure - a jagged, asymmetrical monument that defied any known architecture.

The creature let out a series of those wet, clicking sounds again, a language of pops and rasps that echoed across the harbor. The spire answered with a deeper thrum, a bass note that shook the pier. The command in Dale’s mind became impossible to resist.

Light the beacon. Obey.

Dale turned his back on the rising monolith and walked back toward the harbormaster’s office. The fog parted for him. He moved to the large metal cabinet bolted to the far wall. His hands, which knew this office better than his own home, found the key on its hook and unlocked the heavy padlock.

Inside were the emergency supplies for the harbor: flares, a first-aid kit, and a bulky marine radio. He ignored them all. His fingers closed around the harbor’s most powerful spotlight, the one used for searching the water at night for distressed boats. He hefted its weight, carried it back outside, and set it on the porch railing, its cord trailing back through the broken doorway to the interior outlet.

He plugged it in. His thumb found the switch and pressed it. A brilliant white beam lanced through the fog, illuminating the scene. The black spire was fully revealed now, a twisted obelisk that stood a dozen feet above the water, its surface crawling with the same faint green luminescence. The water around it frothed and bubbled violently.

And in the heart of that beam, the creature stood at the end of the pier, her many limbs splayed for balance. She raised her arms, the human-like hands pale and graceful, and the dark hair fell back from her visage.

For the first time, Dale saw her fully. The face was pale and beautiful in a way that was utterly wrong, devoid of any humanity, her features too symmetrical, too still. Her single, large eye, a pool of milky white with a pinprick of black at its center, reflected the spotlight’s beam.

Go, the creature commanded in Dale’s mind.

Dale stepped off the edge of the pier. The cold water shocked his system for a fraction of a second before he got used to it. He swam with strong, steady strokes toward the structure, the skiff bobbing forgotten behind him.

He reached the slick, dark stone and hauled himself out of the water. The surface was strangely warm, thrumming with the same energy that filled the air. He stood on a wide, flat platform, water streaming from his clothes. Before him, a vast, open archway led into the heart of the structure. An impenetrable darkness lay within, darker than the night, darker than the sea.

The creature flowed past him, her many limbs carrying her silently over the strange stone. She paused at the threshold of the archway and turned her head. The pale eye found him again, and a final, simple directive imprinted itself on his consciousness.

Wait.

Dale stood perfectly still, facing the shore he had fled from. Heron’s Cove was a smudge of indistinct shapes in the thick fog. He was a sentinel. His purpose was to stand watch until he was needed for the next task. The thought was comforting. It required no questioning, no fear. It simply was.

From the dark archway behind him, he heard the wet, clicking sounds begin again, softer now, almost conversational. They were joined by other sounds, similar yet different, rising from deeper within the sunken ruin. A chorus of them. They had been waiting. They were waking up.

He did not turn to look. His eyes remained fixed on the sleeping town, a perfect, obedient statue, waiting for the nightmarish curtain to rise.

The End