Neptune's Tide

“Another day, another dozen tide pools,” Milo said to the scattering arthropods on the freshly exposed beach before him. Dr. Milo Wilson was a marine biologist, specializing in the effects of overfishing on aquatic ecosystems. He was playing in tide pools outside the fishing village of Tarent’s Cove.

Tarent’s Cove was a small, but highly productive fishing village on the New England coast. While the population never seemed to bloat beyond two hundred residents, it also never suffered from any of the disastrous depletions of fish that had ruined so many of the nearby towns. It was that peculiarity that had brought Milo to Tarent’s Cove in late August.

Since the coastal village lacked a proper Inn, he had rented a small cottage that sat in the backyard of a prominent fisherman like a brown and off-white tackle box. He had been there for three weeks and had yet to find any indication of why the fish population there hadn’t suffered like other areas despite the village’s best attempts. He had studied the tide pools, been out to every single fishing spot with multiple different fishermen to record information but saw nothing remarkable.

After weeks of research, it seemed that the fish populations were just healthier there than anywhere else without any environmental causes. With nothing to go on, he had taken to inspecting the shoreline during the different tidal periods, by then wearing a heavy jacket to protect himself from the brisk September winds. The waves crashed against the sand, and the water always seemed most violent in the immediate area around him, as if the ocean was itself some sort of creature snapping at his ankles, but trapped in the cage of its own horrible mass.

It was on that afternoon stroll that he first caught sight of the monolithic stone that rose a man’s height above the water. In the distance, it looked to be natural, just a product of geology and erosion. As he neared the aberration, it reminded him of the sea stacks of Tasmania, except in miniature.

He reached the point on the beach where he could no longer approach the structure without dipping his feet into the cold water. Milo squinted, hoping the effort would reveal some great secret that had been hidden the entire stretch of his walk. He stared, losing himself in concentration as the wind buffeted his face with such a ferocious cold air that tears began to stream from his stinging eyes.

“Odd, isn’t it?” A voice from behind caused Milo to nearly jump out of his skin.

He turned around to see Marcus Delaney, a fisherman in his mid-40s with a heavy, dark beard and a worn baseball cap that never left his head.

“What is it, anyways?”

“Just an old rock, like any other,” Marcus said with a shrug, but his brown eyes never looked away from the formation.

“Ah.” Milo shivered. “I was hoping it might have been the mast of some Spanish Galleon filled with gold.

“The only gold in Tarent’s Bay is right here.” Marcus pointed at an old filling in one of his back molars. It glinted slightly, taunting Milo with its ancient, primordial avarice.

“I suppose that makes you a wealthy man, Mr. Delaney,” Milo remarked with a smile.

Marcus let out a slight laugh, and grabbed Milo gently by the shoulder before replying, “let’s head back into town and grab a beer.”

Milo nodded, feeling lost in his research, and believing that, maybe, a good buzz might somehow give him a sense of direction. The two turned away from the beach as an enormous wave blasted against the rock formation, enticing Milo to turn around and watch. As he did, he saw something blast out from the rock, something forced to part with the stone by the force of the wave. Ropes.

#

Milo found himself stumbling into his cottage well after sundown, feeling very buzzed, and frustrated. He had enjoyed his time out at the sole town pub with Marcus, but he had spent the whole time fighting back thoughts about how much of a waste this whole endeavor was proving to be.

A storm raged outside, one that he had staggered through with the impenetrable cloak of drunken numbness. With every flash of lightning, the entire yard would become lit up in a pale ambience. A ghastly aura, he thought, one that drove home the feelings of isolation that had been amplifying in his mind since he’d arrived in the New England village. He looked down at the piles of paperwork and research that coated his desk in a frustrating turf, filled with his theories that had been debunked and drowned under all the data he’d collected.

If it wasn’t for the grant money funding this trip, he would have been forced to abandon this endeavor and move on to another after the first week. As it was, he would only be able to stay another week at most. The university was already breathing down his neck about being away at the start of the semester, he didn’t need more scrutiny from them. What he needed from them was a bit more money and a whole lot of time.

He flopped down on his bed and his thoughts drifted away from his woes, back to the beach and to the spire. Something about it unsettled him. It could be the out of place feeling of it, or the idea that it would be there waiting under the high tide ready to carve a fatal incision into the bottom of an unsuspecting boat. However, when he thought about either of those things in more depth, he didn’t think it was either of those. The only other feature he could remember from it were the ropes tied to it.

The ropes!

He sat upright and grabbed the notepad and pencil from the bedside table. Why were there ropes tied to it? When he had first seen them, he had just assumed that people used it as a mooring point, but with it only being visible to that extent at low tide it wasn’t a viable spot for regular mooring of a boat. He supposed they could have just gotten snagged there by the tide, but he swore it looked like they were tied there. He jotted those thoughts down on the pad in sloppy inebriated handwriting.

That was it he decided, he would go back to inspect it tomorrow after the storm had passed. For now, all he could do was hope sleep found him soon. He set the notepad and the pencil back on the bedside table, before drifting off to a dreamless sleep.

Milo wandered out of the cottage with a long yawn and a cup of coffee feeling heavy in his hand. It was early morning, and the only thing occupying his mind was the singular obsession with the pillar in the water. The next low tide would peak at just after one in the morning, his next chance at investigating the matter felt so far away. There were six more cups of coffee lurking in the pot for him to ration out for the day, and a sandbag of dark roast remaining in the tiny pantry bin that was bolted into the wall right above the sink.

He could see Marcus standing in the kitchen window of his old colonial house with an out of place kayak propped up against the brick siding. The fisherman gave him a wave, which Milo construed as an invitation to come inside, out of the frigid remnants of a coastal storm’s wake. Milo wandered into the house, feeling the air rush around him as the ambience shifted gears from the perishing cold to the dry warmth. A wood stove roared across the room, itself isolated from anything else while Marcus washed dishes. A cup of hot coffee lay undisturbed next to the sink.

“I made coffee, but it looks like you’ve already had your morning’s worth,” Marcus said, his voice dragging along in his throat and emerging from his mouth in limp syllables and a miserable cadence.

“Unless you save the good stuff for yourself, I’m okay with what I got.” Milo took a sip of his coffee, which had been drowned in heavy cream and sugar.

“You never know,” Marcus said, “I could be holding out on my guests.”

“That’s what I love about staying here. I can’t trust my host for a moment,” Milo said with a laugh.

Marcus took a break from the dishes to sip coffee with Milo at the kitchen table, which looked like it was as old as anything in the historic town. Milo took great care to place his drink upon a stoneware coaster, itself looking like it belonged to some ancient ruin somewhere across the ocean.

“So, what have you found out?” Marcus asked, suddenly taking an interrogative tone.

“Hmm?” Milo asked, choking a bit on his coffee as a fear crawled up his spine, delivering the idea that perhaps Marcus wasn’t entirely oblivious to Milo’s strange obsession with the rock formation. This sensation, although brief, did little to quell Milo’s curiosity.

“The fish. Why is the fishing always so good here?”

“Oh!” Milo exclaimed, his thoughts quickly changing formation. “Nothing. You’ve the healthiest marine life of any place I’ve ever sampled, but there’s no environmental causes that I can discern. Yet.”

“The old people here always say it’s a blessing, like God works with fishing villages,” Marcus said with a hearty laugh.

“It currently has defied my observations, but I’m sure I’ll find something before I have to head back. Just have to sort through all the variables.”

“See.” Marcus leaned heavily over the table and twiddled his massive thumbs together. “I could never do something like that. I enjoy the simple life too much. I get on a boat, I go out in the water, and I catch fish. I keep going out, and the fish keep coming in. Been that way my entire life.”

“That sounds like a life well lived,” Milo said, before he finished his cup of coffee.

“So, what’s your plan for today?” Marcus abruptly asked.

“Check a few water levels, basic testing. Afterward I might go for a walk, try to get those beers out of my head if I can.”

“I forgot to consider your lack of sea legs. Jake likes to pour heavy.”

“I appreciated it at the time,” Milo chuckled. “I’m going to get a bit more coffee, but I’m sure I’ll see you around at some point today.”

“That’s small-town life for ya,” Marcus said as Milo walked back out the door.

Back in the cottage, Milo scooped up his notepad and pencil, sticking both into his back pocket before fixing himself another cup of coffee. The rest of the morning he spent doing routine, unexciting tests in the surrounding waters, still finding nothing out of the ordinary. There were, however, a few samples that he would have to send back to a university lab to get analyzed. For that, he made a trip across the small town, on foot, to send everything through the mail. Afterward, with no further official business scheduled for the day, he sat in his cottage, and read his writings from the notebook -. They read like the writings of a raving lunatic, he thought, and he set the notepad back onto the nightstand with a shrug.

He took a stroll later that evening, following the same route that he had before. It was a narrow trail that led down from the yard, and in one section it was quite steep. The trail spilled out onto the beach not far from where he wanted to be, not far from the structure. He walked in its direction, seeing it poking above the water, but no further than it had before. It was, he thought to himself, much too early for the tide to have receded sufficiently. With a sigh, he returned to the cottage for the remainder of the evening, once again placing the notepad on his nightstand.

It was a quarter to one in the morning and Milo felt like he was bundled up for an arctic expedition. He had put on several layers of clothes, culminating with the oversized rain slicker. Bracing himself for the cold nighttime winds, he set off from his cottage for the spire. The sky was clear, with a cold wind that blew in from the ocean, but he made the short jaunt there in under fifteen minutes and was met with a sight that shocked and horrified him.

A crowd had gathered on the beach, one that seemingly consisted of the entire population of Tarent’s Cove. Milo was still in the shadows of the path along the steep cliffs and coarse vegetation, and the outerwear he’d selected was fortunately of a dark, earthy color. Still, he felt as if the entire crowd was watching him, as if they could all see through the dark, sordid night. At the locus of the crowd, however, stood a figure isolated from the rest, one adorned in a strange ceremonial garb that resembled the togas of ancient Rome. The white of the outfit shone like a pearl, flashing through the crowd even as their shifting masses partially obscured the figure.

His heart threatening to leap from his chest, Milo continued his approach, slowly shuffling down the trail in a crouch. As he neared, he could make out voices, but not the words they spoke. It was a different language, an older language, an ancient one.

“Latin,” he muttered to himself.

In an instant, the figure at the center of the crowd was seized upon by several others, and they began to drag him out into the water, directly towards the rock that, in the deep of the night, loomed with little more than a few inches of it still submerged in the water. Milo could hear the figure shouting, screaming at the top of his lungs for the others to free him, asking them why, begging them for life.

Milo watched in horror as they hoisted the man onto the rock, securing his arms and legs with the ropes that he had seen the day before. The figures retreated from the stone as several symbols, latinate in origin, began to glow with a turquoise light.

Obelisk? Milo thought to himself.

The light grew in intensity until the entirety of the crowd was illuminated, with the aura scarcely failing to reach Milo himself from his position of cover. The light, however, ceased to be the center of his focus as it emerged.

From the undulated waters, far in the distance, he could hear it breach. Beneath the pale light of the moon he could see it, the enormous form of a creature the devil himself couldn’t conjure. It approached, its mass no less than that of the largest whale being pulled along by dozens of crustacean-like appendages that rose above the water. It was unclear whether the creature was in the water at all as it finished its approach with a set of open jaws lined with countless conical teeth that glistened like pale arms reaching from its foul lips. Its eyes, dark as any abyss, stared blankly to the sides as it closed the distance. The man ceased his screaming, still tethered to the obelisk as the horror clamped down with the effort of a grown man’s hand crushing a dry leaf.

The crowd chanted in Latin with rapturous cheers as Milo made his hasty retreat up the trail. When he looked back, the creature had already disappeared, and the crowd was beginning to disperse noiselessly. Even the symbols on the obelisk had dimmed, withering into dark as Milo stumbled up the rest of the trail.

Marcus was waiting for Milo in the incandescent cottage when he returned. He was seated at the cluttered desk, with Milo’s notepad in his hand and a weary sunk in on his face. “Well, you now know why the fish here are so healthy.”

“What?” Milo asked, caught off guard.

“The fish. They’re so plentiful here because Neptune blesses this place… or rather curses it.” Marcus set the notepad down.

“Neptune? Is that the monster I just saw devouring a person?” Milo clenched his fist but had no idea what to do with it.

“Yes. The God of the Sea. We make a monthly sacrifice to him on his tide, and he provides for us… in more ways than one.”

“You people are nuts!” Milo said as he took a step backwards.

“We’re not crazy, we’re cursed. We thought it was a blessing at first, of course, but that was two thousand years ago.” Marcus stood up, looming over Milo as he took heavy steps towards the petrified biologist.

“Two thousand years ago? How is that even possible?”

“We weren’t always here in New England. We came from what is now Italy, but back then it was part of the Roman Empire. We lived in a poor fishing village and made a deal with the gods to have a plentiful reaping. The terms, however, were that we would become Neptune’s eternal servants, providing him with monthly human sacrifices.”

“Okay,” Milo said, struggling to process the information.

“We tried to flee inland, but our crops wouldn’t grow, and the animals we hunted, their corpses rotted before we could even field dress them. We then tried to escape him by coming over here after the colonies were established, to live along the coastline, but he followed us.”

“Are you going to kill me?” Milo asked like a timid child.

“No. You may leave,” Marcus replied.

Milo said nothing as he opened the door behind him.

“But remember this, Mr. Wilson. There are still Gods in this world.” Marcus paused as Milo fled into the night. “And some of them are monsters.”