Crimson Shore

I told you we were out of candles,” Mark Lillie said, opening and slamming drawers, his voice raised over the banging of a loose shutter in the wind. “Two weeks ago when we had the last blackout, I told you we needed candles.”

“You only imagine you told me that,” said Sarah. “What about the shutters I’ve been telling you to fix for the past year?”

As if to underscore her comment, the shutter banged again. He pulled a flashlight out of a drawer, cursing.

“What’s wrong with that?” Sarah asked.

Mark turned it on, shining it in her face. “A flashlight doesn’t exactly light up a room.”

“Get that out of my eyes.”

“I’m just making a point. This is like the fifth blackout this year. You’d think that you — of all people — would have a good supply of candles.”

“No one’s stopping you from buying candles when you’re in town — which you are every day.”

“I assumed you’d taken care of it. There’s this thing called a division of labor.”

“You never mentioned we were out of candles.”

“I did. You just forgot.” He threw himself down on the sofa in disgust. This was what their life was like, fighting every damn day over the stupidest of things. He wondered what he’d ever seen in this woman. They didn’t have kids. No reason they couldn’t end it now. But there were complications, financial entanglements…

The shutter slammed into the side of the house again, and a strong gust rattled the windows in their frames. The shutter slammed yet again, harder, and this time a windowpane broke with a tinkling of glass. A howl of wind came in, accompanied by a gust of rain, knocking over a photo frame standing on the sill.

“There!” Sarah cried triumphantly. “Now look at what’s happened!”

The wind gusted again, a splatter of raindrops spotting the table — and carried along with it the howl of an animal outside.

“What was that?” Mark asked.

Sarah stood where she was, not saying anything, straining to look into the darkness. “That was really close to the house.”

“Somebody’s stupid dog, left out in the rain.”

“It didn’t sound like a dog.”

“Of course it’s a dog. What else could it be?”

Another howl, this time from the darkness right before the window.

“Go take a look,” said Sarah.

He took the flashlight and went into the front hall, shining the light out through the door window.

“Ahh!” he screamed, falling back just as the door burst open with a crash. A dark shape out of a nightmare bounded in, cloaked in nothing but a vile stench. Lillie wildly flailed his arms in disbelief and terror, trying to fend the beast off, but with a terrible inchoate roar it swung two stringy arms around him, grasping his midriff with its clawed hands.

“No, no!” he screamed, trying to twist away as he felt the long, sharp nails digging into his gut.

“Stop it! No!” He could vaguely hear his wife in the background, screaming.

A sudden popping sound, like fat being pulled off of meat, and the hands opened him up like drawing back a pair of curtains. All was dark, the flashlight was gone, and he was only able to feel — and what he felt was a blast of cold air inside his very body cavity that, for just a moment, overwhelmed even the sudden agony. He fell back with a scream of horror and pain beyond description, and even as he did he could feel something reaming him out from the inside, accompanied by the loud, wet, busy sound of chewing.

44

Constance Greene was soaked to the bone, her sodden dress clinging heavily to her body, the hem bedraggled with sand and mud. But she did not feel the cold: her homeless childhood on the docks of New York City seemed to have made her permanently immune to chill. The wind thrashed the salt grass and cattails, which swayed crazily as she pushed her way through, her low boots squishing along the marshy ground, the flashlight beam playing into the murk, illuminating the slashing drops of rain. She moved swiftly, her mind an angry, embarrassed, humiliated blank.

At first, her instinct had been simply to get away — get away before she did something so violent and permanent she would regret it forever. But as she ran from the Inn, south toward the dunes and the salt grass, the faintest of plans began to form.