The Origin (The Sighting #2) Read online

  Danny watched her go, searching for a name and, coming up with nothing, accepting the possibility that he never knew it to begin with. He’d only had two beers last night at Mason’s—the closest bar, only three blocks away—and he hadn’t really gone there for the purposes of coming home with anyone. But the nameless girl who was now stuffing things in a bag in his bedroom had begun flirting with him almost immediately, and less than two hours later she was walking with him on the beach toward his house. She must have said her name at some point, but really, what difference did it make now?

  Although, if he had come to the right place—that is, if Wickard Beach was the latest feeding ground of the god—it wouldn’t hurt to keep a few contacts in the Rolodex.

  Danny took a deep breath and followed the girl into the bedroom. As he passed the bar that bordered his kitchen, he saw the woman’s purse sitting tucked in the corner. He paused a moment, and then quickly scavenged for her wallet, pulling it out and checking her driver’s license.

  Samantha. Probably went by Sam.

  He stuffed the wallet back inside and entered the room. “Look, Sam, I’m sorry.”

  The woman looked up at Danny, a look of gentle surprise on her face, and then she went back to gathering her things.

  “Stay. Please. Just until I get back. Which won’t be long. I’ll be back here by eight and then, instead of you making me breakfast, we’ll go out. My treat.”

  Sam flashed her head up again, this time her brow was wrinkled, confused. “Really?” she asked, as if the offer of someone to take her out for a meal was a practice she didn’t quite understand. Danny couldn’t imagine why—the woman was no supermodel, but she was attractive by just about any definition.

  “Absolutely. You can even get the steak and eggs.”

  “I’m vegan.”

  Danny smiled. “Of course you are.”

  Danny leaned in to kiss Sam on the cheek, but the girl put her hands up in front of her and frowned, suggesting that breakfast was fine, but Danny shouldn’t get carried away.

  “I’ll be back.”

  Danny grabbed his beach bag from the counter and pushed through the screen door, descending the steps that ran along the side porch of the rental house until he was standing on the battered boardwalk that led to the beach. In less than thirty seconds, his feet were off the splintered wood and he was standing barefoot in the cool sand.

  He closed his eyes and luxuriated in the crisp morning air. It was the type of air only found near the ocean, before sunrise, and only on overcast days. Danny opened his eyes reluctantly and stared across the water, watching the cloud-bleached sun push up over the Atlantic. He was suddenly consumed with a spark of déjà vu. That wasn’t surprising, of course, this familiar feeling; almost every day for the last two years was the same as the one before it.

  Danny thought back on the early days at Rove Beach, just after he and Tammy had moved in. Before the sighting on that morning in late summer. Before he lost his wife. Before he lost his sanity to the creature that emerged on the beach that day.

  And before Lynn Shields, the woman who had tried to sacrifice him to the monster and who would alter the course of his life forever.

  He recalled those days prior to the sighting with such fondness now, in a way he never appreciated them before. Those were easy days, leisurely, as perfect a life as he could ever have imagined leading. It was almost a fairy tale, really, spending his days in a locale as beautiful as the wife he lived with. He had youth and money and plans for a family. He was still without real purpose in his life, but that would come later. It was time to enjoy his success. It was time to hit the beach.

  But it was the beach that would change him. If only his dream had been to live in the mountains. Or in the heart of Manhattan, maybe. How different his life would be now.

  But Danny had loved the beach since he was a kid, the smell and sound of it, in particular, and when he had finally started living there, he had come to relish his morning jogs along the coastal highway as much as anything in his life. He felt strong in the morning, and when he would finally reach the sand at the bottom of the overlook, he would take his pre-dawn swim in the Atlantic, grounding him to the earth, connecting him to the lifeforce of the universe.

  And when his swim concluded, he would reverse his run back home, almost sprinting the three and a half miles, the salt and sweat encouraging him to reach his house as quickly as his body would allow so that he could feel the wonderful relief of the cool shower.

  But that was his life then, mundane though it may have been, and the fragility of it seemed so comical to Danny now. It took only seconds to collapse it like a mountain of marbles. It took one lone, black figure to emerge like a demon above the surf, to stand tall and still on the shores of Rove Beach. One glimpse of that demon-deity and Danny could never have his fantasy life again. Some images lived in a mind forever; every piece of Danny’s life from that moment forward would be polluted with the event.

  Tammy was gone now, killed violently, a victim of the devil-god from the sea. And Danny himself had become so addicted to the thing’s existence that he had constructed a plan to offer up his friends as a sacrifice. He had drugged Tracy and Sarah that first night—had poisoned two people with whom he’d become friends and who had shared the experience of the monster’s massacre with Danny. He had become enchanted by the sea beast, addicted to it, and the offering of the women was the only way Danny could keep the spell from dying.

  Thankfully, the god hadn’t appeared on the beach that night, despite Danny blasting the cries of the minke whales, and Danny knew in his heart that the cycle had finally ended.

  That evening, Danny had managed to transport the women back from the grotto—the same prison where Lynn Shields had kept Danny—without either of them the wiser, and he had continued his weekly dinners with both of them, each time with the intention of watching their slaughter by the giant beast.

  But he never saw it again. The god had moved on from Rove beach.

  Perhaps it was to do with Lynn Shields, he had speculated. The god had lost its master. The woman who had called and fed the beast for so many years, was now gone. How it would have sensed her absence, Danny didn’t know, but Tracy had told him the story her aunt used to tell about the ‘Master of the Shore,’ the person who, over time, could learn to control the actions of the being, at least to the extent that he or she could consistently draw it from the seas. There was no way to confirm that this was the monster’s motives for disappearing, but Danny thought it as good a theory as any.

  But it was gone, and as each day passed without this false god in Danny’s life, the poison of its addiction faded a little further from his soul.

  He thought of Tracy and Sarah again, both of whom were still alive and well in Rove Beach. As far as Danny knew, neither had ever suspected Danny of the malice he had once intended. He had laid off the sedatives after that first night, since both women had passed out and woke the next morning with a pair of splitting headaches, and he obviously couldn’t have kept that story up for long, using wine and too much to drink as the reason for their lack of memory. Had the Ocean God appeared again, Danny wasn’t sure exactly what he would have done, though he supposed he would have found other ways to disable the women and drag them to the beach. Shovels were useful for such things. And hammers.

  Danny hadn’t heard from Sarah in several months, though he occasionally saw her byline in the Rove Beach Rover (one of the newspapers he continued to receive weekly), writing under her new pen name.

  Tracy, on the other hand, he spoke with quite frequently. She continued to reside rent-free in the home Danny had bought from her, the home Lynn Shield’s had left to the girl in her will. He had originally purchased it for the purposes of keeping a close watch on the creature, but now that he was a changed man and the beast was no longer in Rove Beach, he was ready to sell. Danny simply couldn’t afford it. The royalty checks from his ‘Superstar’ song still arrived monthly, they just weren’
t the sizes they used to be.

  But as much as he wanted to sell, he felt he owed it to Tracy to keep up the payments and let her stay. His guilt haunted him now. He felt like a serial killer who had been reborn, who had finally recognized the wickedness of his ways before he was ever caught and tried for his crimes, and now had to make amends in other ways.

  That was his quest now: to find the Ocean God before it killed again.

  He knew he should turn himself in, of course, if not for the attempted murder of Tracy and Sarah—he hadn’t overtly attempted anything, really—then for the cover-up of his own wife’s murder. He was with her at the time of her death, had seen every gruesome second of it, and thus was obligated to report it to the police.

  But Danny couldn’t imagine what that would even look like. The police hadn’t believed the cell phone picture of the monster, had continued to dismiss it as a hoax, so how exactly could he explain that Tammy’s death came at the hands of the monster?

  There were only two conclusions he could see coming from his confession: either he would be considered out of his mind and committed to an institution, or he would be tried for the disappearance and murder of his wife and end up in prison. But he wasn’t crazy, and he didn’t kill his wife, at least not in the way for which he’d be accused, and thus both of those outcomes were unacceptable. He would live with the guilt. For now. Until he could enact his own form of repentance.

  Danny took a deep breath and then proceeded down to the water’s edge, removing the portable Bluetooth speaker from his bag as he went. He tossed a towel from his shoulder onto the sand and placed the waterproof speaker on top. He then pulled his phone from his pocket and pressed the ‘Downloads’ icon, pulling up a single file of a .wav recording titled ‘Minke.’

  He touched the recording with his finger, and a familiar chill tingled down his spine as the sound of the low, alien cries erupted from the speakers. The minke whales. Mating perhaps, or beckoning to potential mates, he had never really known for sure.

  Danny glanced around suspiciously and quickly adjusted the volume. It wasn’t nosy bystanders he worried about; these types of sleepy, sunny locales were notorious for old beachcombers who didn’t think twice about asking a stranger his business. He’d been asked a thousand times what he was doing, and so he always kept a couple of answers chambered, usually to do with some piece of music he was writing. He was a songwriter by trade, after all, so the response came naturally to him.

  But Danny didn’t feel much like chatting today; he was now obligated to breakfast with Sam, so he wanted the few minutes he had now to be alone with his thoughts.

  Twenty minutes passed and Danny turned off the recording and folded up the towel. He would be back again at sundown, and would let the recording go for several hours. It was a new strategy to come at dusk, and it was based on nothing other than he needed to change his methods for luring the beast.

  “Whatcha doing?”

  The sing-songy voice of a child came from Danny’s right, and Danny nearly screamed at the sound. He whipped his head around to see a boy of no more than nine standing with his head cocked to the side, trying to figure out the scene in front of him. He held a large conch shell in his hand and beside him was a beautiful black Labrador retriever.

  “I’m working on some, uh, music.”

  The boy didn’t reply, clearly not seeing any connection between what Danny was doing and any music that he had ever heard.

  “It’s uh, I’m recording sounds for a song.”

  “What sounds? The ocean? I hear ocean noises in here.” He held up the shell for Danny to see. “And I make music with it too.” He blew through the shell once, making a low, bellowing sound.

  Danny smiled politely. “It’s kind of like that, yes.”

  “But not really?”

  When spectators questioned him this way, Danny’s normal play was to act like he was getting some marine feedback and had to get back to work. But he sensed this boy wouldn’t get the hints.

  “They’re whale sounds. Minke whales. I’m trying to lure something...from the water.” Danny had no idea why he was offering up this much of the truth to this kid; there were so many other explanations he could have gone with. Maybe he needed just to say it once, aloud to another human being, for cathartic reasons.

  “The black and purple man?”

  Danny quite literally stopped breathing at the sound of the boy’s words. It was as if the oxygen in his lungs had suddenly turned to clay. Gradually, he bent over at the waist, tears in his eyes, putting his hands on his knees.

  “Are you okay?” the boy asked.

  Danny put a hand up and then began to cough. The dog barked nervously in response.

  “Should I get my dad?”

  Danny shook his head furiously and then stood straight, finally remembering how to exhale. He took in three full breaths and then folded his hands and placed the tips of his fingers beneath his chin. He looked the boy in the eye. “What man?”

  The boy turned and faced the water, his face now solemn as he stared out at the waves. “They don’t believe me.”

  Danny turned and faced the water too, examining the ocean where the boy was peering, as if expecting the beast to emerge at that moment. “What’s your name?”

  “Shane.”

  “Shane,” Danny repeated. “That’s a solid name.”

  The boy shrugged.

  “I believe you, Shane. I’ve seen it too.”

  The boy turned to Danny now, his eyes on fire, a mixture of both hope and fear. “You know the black and purple man?”

  The black and purple man.

  It wasn’t the way any adult of the current day would have described the creature, not in this world awash of racial sensitivity and political correctness. But a child of Shane’s age hadn’t developed such verbal governors yet, and the description cut right to the bone.

  “When do you see it?” Danny asked, afraid of losing the boy’s interest, or perhaps his trust, fearing that anything other than one or two simple questions would scare the boy off.

  He shrugged again and shook his head. “Not in a long time.”

  A long time. That could mean anything. A long time in the mind of a nine-year old could mean three or four hours ago. “Did you see it before or—”

  “Why do you call it ‘it’?”

  “What?”

  “You said ‘it,’ ‘Did you see it.’”

  “Him,” Danny corrected quickly, “Did you see him—the black and purple man—before or after...um...Christmas let’s say?”

  The boy looked to the sky a moment and then said, “I saw him on my mom’s birthday.”

  Danny nodded, feeling lucky that with that information he’d be able to get an exact date. “And when was that?”

  “Shane!” a male voice called from the distance, south down the beach from where these two unlikely conversationalists now stood. “Shane, you need to get back over here. Now!” The voice was angry, heavy with an accent from either New York or Jersey. No doubt the father. Danny knew anger was a reasonable reaction to the boy wandering, especially considering the number of ‘drownings’ that had occurred here in the past few months.

  Shane turned toward the voice and the big lab cocked his head once to the side and then took off like a bullet toward the man’s call.

  “Okay, bye,” Shane said, lopping off the conversation abruptly, as if they had come to some point where the conclusion was satisfactory.

  “Shane!” Danny said, stopping the boy in his tracks. He needed to get the date.

  But it was too late; the father was now upon them. There was no way Danny could ask such a personal question about the boy’s mother now, not without either having the police show up at his house later that morning or getting a punch in the nose.

  “It was nice to meet you,” Danny said before looking up at Shane’s father, who was a tall, burly fellow with dark eyes and a hairline like a waning crescent. Danny smiled humbly, but the man only squinte
d and clicked his head up in return.

  Danny brought his attention back to his phone, pretending to be engrossed in his whale-sounds project.

  It was only about twenty seconds later, after Danny had begun to process the boy’s information, thinking about what steps he would take next, when Danny heard the boy call from down the beach.

  “It was on Saturday, mister,” Shane called.

  Danny snapped his head to the boy, his eyes wide and crazed.

  “We had cake and everything.”

  Chapter 3

  “Kitchi was the first to speak of it. At least to me. He told of a large creature that lives among the waves of the Yapam.” Nootau never took his eyes from the water as he revealed the source of the information that had propelled the two boys on their adventure.

  “Kitchi?” Samuel asked. “But...how would Kitchi know?”

  Kitchi was Nootau’s cousin, or perhaps his uncle—the relationship had always been unclear to Samuel—and he had been born crippled, unable to walk since birth.

  “He was told of it by his grandfather, my great uncle, and then Kitchi told it to me, on a night when he was under the influence of mead. He said he was sworn to secrecy by his grandfather, but Kitchi has little control in the hours after midnight.”

  Samuel stayed quiet, but he knew that Nootau could sense his doubt. It was a third-hand sighting, a re-telling of another’s story, and told to Nootau by a cripple and a notorious drunkard.

  “You don’t believe me Samuel, that is fine. I know your people think of us as storytellers, as inventors of the truth rather than revealers of it. That has always been one of your people’s many misjudgements. And yours is yet another misinterpretation. We do have our religion, just as you have yours of Jesus and your book of The Bible. But we don’t lie, Samuel. If Kitchi’s grandfather told him of this creature, and warned him never to tell of it to another, then it—”

  Bwoosh!