Pompano Lagoon had recently become a tourist destination.
None of the locals had ever made any effort to attract outsiders. The diner in the middle of town served the same items it had since its stainless steel modules were first put together on First Street. None of the fishermen were particularly inclined to trade in their trawlers for tour boats or their rods and nets for cheap wine and prepackaged snacks. For the last century or so, even the Williams family, with their three-room inn by the highway, never drew in more than the occasional lost motorist.
Even so, tourists found Pompano Lagoon. At first, it was just a few families without much money to spare coming on vacation from places further inland. The beaches of Opah Dunes were not so far away, though they were, in the opinion of most locals, nothing to write home about either. Still, those first few families stayed at the inn, drove out to the beach, and bought a few trinkets to commemorate their trip.
It only took a few years before teenagers, nostalgic for the places they had seen as children, showed up in groups a bit too large for the old inn to handle. Many drove on to find motels closer to the beach. To the surprise of the locals, however, a few proved far more insistent. Fortune, it seemed, favored a number of the original families. Their children arrived with enough money to persuade this fishmonger or that dockworker to rent them a tiny loft or perhaps a makeshift bed by a window. The worse the conditions, the more rustic the town seemed.
As soon as the young visitors returned home, they shared photographs and stories with their friends. The next year, larger groups arrived. Everything that seemed mundane to the locals—iron fishing hooks, red and white life preservers, old bowls made of tin, canvas sacks, and even stained tobacco pouches—seemed a potential souvenir to the tourists. Sentimental objects were not spared either. Some nineteen year old boy left town with a photograph of a sailor he had never met. In return, a fisherman walked away with more than he made in three weeks. Even as they did nothing to encourage it, the townspeople could not resist the change.
For most people, the money brought in by tourists could hardly be called a problem. Fishing boats made less per haul than they once did, so their crews were happy to part with old junk in return for ten or twenty times what they paid for it brand new. The local church became something of an attraction because it held a relic of Saint Sonia of Ichnia, meaning that it quickly raised enough funds to fix a decades-old crack in its bell. Despite all of this, though, the new arrivals were not entirely welcome by a very particular portion of the population.
When some millionaire first drained the swamps north of Opah Dunes to build up a new town, Henry Disston’s great grandparents answered the call and moved out to the newly-formed Pompano Lagoon. His grandfather worked as a fisherman, selling every haul to that same millionaire’s company. Eventually, that business was sold off to some immense food conglomerate, but it kept buying from its old suppliers. Additional money to keep the town running did stop flowing, however. The new owners were not at all interested in real estate development. They claimed it detracted from the main business. This suited Henry’s father just fine, though. In addition to fishing, he worked around town, fighting off the encroaching water by building walls or digging ditches.
By the time Henry inherited the house, it was clear that the battle was lost. No matter how much work a handful of laborers could do, they were no substitute for heavy machinery built to drain water out of the swamp and fill it in with soil. The government provided a small sum each year to preserve smaller localities, but the council usually spent it on areas closer to the docks. Henry’s little corner of town quickly returned to being a fetid swamp. By digging some small ditches and using a number of sandbags, he and his neighbors kept the water away from their homes for the most part. On rainy days, it was almost impossible to drive on the roads, so they tried to plan around the weather. Horrid as it was, it had not yet attracted the tourists, but they all knew it would happen eventually.
Henry saw himself as a simple man for the most part. He fancied himself a fisherman, though he spent more time doing odd jobs for his neighbors than out on any of the trawlers. He dressed in durable, navy blue pants, a light grey, short-sleeve work shirt, and the same worn-down wading boots he had since he turned twenty. He also had a horrible secret, of course, though he tried not to let that detract from his self-image.
When he had just turned twenty three, about a week after the last big hurricane hit the town, Henry went out to help his neighbors fix the drainage ditches and get the water back under control. It took hours just to ensure Father Owen, the priest who ran the small chapel the larger church had replaced fifty-or-so years earlier, would be able to sleep the night in his own house again. Late that night, when the others stopped to play cards and drink behind the abandoned gas station, he decided he’d continue just a bit longer. Widening the ditches even a small amount, he hoped, would help more water drain away over the course of the night.
Well, while Henry was digging through the mud, he found something. It was wrapped in sackcloth and was completely still. In the dark, he peeled away the muddy fabric. As far as he could tell, it was an infant.
Though Henry never considered himself a particularly pious man, he knew a tragedy when he saw one. Cradling the infant in both arms as though to give it one final bit of fatherly comfort before its soul reached its final destination, he took it over to the priest and his other neighbors. There, in the soft glow of the single propane lamp that lit the game of rummy, Father Owen, Harvey Cooke, Hugh Robertson, Kevin Key, Jane Plancker, and Henry himself saw the truth of what he had found in the muck.
The rough shape was that of an infant, yes, but what seemed like two little legs huddled up to its chest was, in fact, a bundle of eight thin, delicate black limbs stuck to each other by quickly-drying mud. The skin was smooth but not soft. It was like matte black ceramic. Its fingers were too long, and each one had an extra joint. Even as small as it was, its nails were like obsidian daggers. Mercifully, its mouth remained closed, letting them see only its dull grey lips. Its eyes, on the other hand, were wide open. Indeed, it seemed to lack eyelids of any kind. In each socket, there was a cluster of eight small, disuniform eyes that looked like milky blisters. Its head and body were completely hairless, but on its back, it had a pair of moth-like wings with a beautiful pattern of purples, greens, and blues that reminded Henry of a peacock’s feathers.
Hugh Robertson suggested that they bury it back in the mud and forget about it, but Henry was too naive to do so. He insisted that, ugly as it was, they should at least wash it off in a basin and take a closer look. He had hoped this was all some grotesque mistake. A dead babe, half a crab, a plastic bag, low light, alcohol, and exhaustion, he thought, may have all come together to produce a terror. He was wrong. The water only proved it to be the same monster they had seen behind the gas station. Worse yet, as they tended to the thing, its wings and legs began to twitch.
That drunkard Harvey seemed to think it was some novelty—a freak to sell the next time there was a circus in driving distance. Jane and Kevin wanted to kill it before it finished waking up. They only differed on how it should be done. Jane wanted to drown it. Kevin wanted to burn it. Hugh quietly left. By the next morning, his things were packed into his truck and he was on his way out of town.
It was Father Owen’s opinion that ended up holding the most sway over Henry. “No point in trying to kill it now,” the older man had said. “Keep it happy and keep it secret, Henry. The rest is in heaven’s hands.”
Though the priest spoke to Henry, the secret belonged to all of them from then on. Mercifully, when the creature finally awoke, it seemed to be harmless. It stretched its eight legs out and writhed out of Henry’s grasp. Without paying the others any mind, it walked over to the propane lamp and stretched out a hand. As easily as a human child may snatch up a handful of treats, it somehow pulled the light from the air, leaving a dark gap in the circle of illumination the lamp had previously created. Floating a millimeter or two from its fingertips, the light collected into a sphere, then the monster opened its mouth, showing off rows of needle-like teeth that glimmered as though they were covered in glass dust. Without a second thought, it devoured the glowing ball.